
For more than 4,000 years people in the Arctic have served their many purposes by creating inuksuit, stone figures that stand in the place of a human being. Some Inuksuk mark places of power, thresholds of the spiritual landscape that supports people to live in sustainable ways. (learn more about Inuksuks here)
In reflection on our brief meeting each of us will have recognized places that hold power for us. I invite you to build your own inuksuit to mark points of orientation for your journey through and beyond the virus. These are the places of power I took from mixing our meeting with previous conversations. They take the form of questions that recur in my personal life, in my organizational role, in my life as a citizen.
How might we conserve and build on the good emerging in the crisis?
Can we implement practical ways to resist the many pressures to simply reopen outmoded structures, restore typical roles, and settle back into downloading familiar routines? For example, what are the possibilities for co-creating more individualized approaches to supporting people who have spent years in day programs?
How might we identify, broaden, and build on the many inventions resourceful people have created? Use of various technologies to organize and deliver support. Ways people have grown as they adapt to changes in familiar patterns and schedules. Better understanding of people’s capacities and assets. What works to accommodate and assist them.
There is a widespread experience of vulnerability that often shows up as anxiety and closer than usual fear of death. Awareness of the strains of isolation and the importance of person- to-person connection grows. Plans based on prediction, command and control lose their grip to improvisation in response to changing conditions. A sense of “being in it together” seems more than a slogan. The value of mutual support and kindness is raised up. Can anything lasting be mobilized from this experience of solidarity?
Disruption draws attention to what is essential and our understanding of what is productive shakes. Some activity that kept us beyond busy now feels disconnected from what really matters. As the wheels resume turning, how might we intentionally conserve personal and organizational space for the easily overwhelmed essential?
How might we amplify what disruption shows us about injustice and the potential for breakthrough to a greater measure of social justice? Cracks in our society, our economy, our politics, and our publicly funded supports are showing. The costs of inequality are obvious in death rates and massive crises of household economy that threaten to crash the whole economy. Decades of underinvestment in the public sphere show up in unimagined scarcities and bungled initiatives to supply tests and deliver checks. More people feel interdependencies, some with a sense of consolation and solidarity, some with revulsion and urgency to hurry back into the myth of the sovereign individual striving alone against others.
We heard a powerful storyline: deconstruct the power of colonialism (and its offspring, institutionalization) by driving wedges into the cracks that disruption reveals. In our lives at work and in our communities, where are the cracks, what are the wedges, what will concentrate sufficient power to drive them?
How might we link the cause of DSPs as essential workers disadvantaged by economic inequality to whatever broader political and economic initiatives that draw strength from the disruption? For the moment we take more notice of the effects of class, race, gender, and immigration status on the distribution of inequality and so infection. This provides an expanded frame to define the workforce crisis. We need to avoid the trap of applauding heroes while neglecting to act with them to improve material and cultural conditions for their work.
The tragedies of congregate care –disproportionate death toll, staff abandonment, loss of family contact– open cracks in the segregation industry. The contrast with individualized support provided in committed relationships is dramatic and hopeful. How might we shift the conversation from tired, looking-backward responses –higher rates, more rules and measurements, more inspection, more professionals, better training– to looking forward to massive re-investment in individualized, self-directed supports?
How might we strengthen the voices of the people and families we support in decisions about rationing health care that often tip toward a recurrent eugenics. Where it is reported, the death rate for people with disabilities is significantly higher than that of the general population.It matters to introduce the possibility of both unconscious and intentional deathmaking into these difficult discussions.
How might we use the means available to us to support us as we find our way?
Loss, grief, uncertainty, anxiety, time demands, and distance constrain our search for solidarity among those who showed up on Thursday in little rectangles. Such is the desire for contact that the computer screen brought us closer than I expected. But it remains a thin substitute for sharing a moment, a meal, a spontaneous conversation, the perception of the full three-dimensional view of a person with others. Can we find enough through available media to sustain our interest and move us to connect and contribute between calls?
by John O'Brien
(You can download a print version of this blog post here)
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