Growing up in the relatively placid 1990s in stereotypically suburban Naperville, IL, I was always fascinated by stories my teachers taught me of everyday heroes: common people, united by struggle and purpose, who had the extraordinary courage to make immense sacrifices in order to do the right thing during times of crisis. They seemed to be everywhere in history — there were the families who hid Jews like Anne Frank in their attics, or the student activists who sat at restaurant bars in the 1960s and did not flinch while racist townspeople poured ketchup on their heads and later, beat them. There were the unsung heroes of slave rebellions who risked their lives to free their enslaved brethren, and those who risked lashings if they were caught reading, but did it anyway. There were the suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony who refused in court to pay a fine for voting, and then the women of color who dared to demand inclusion and respect from white suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony. The tales of these people, who had somehow persevered through horrifying injustices, the nonstop trauma of war and genocide, profound economic strife — have always been at the heart of my interest in history, which I have made a career out of teaching.
In fourth grade, I was selected to read my essay about Veterans’ Day in front of the school as part of an assembly. I had never met a veteran and had no relatives in the military, and yet I managed to write a pretty convincing speech about their courage and sacrifice and how we should honor them. In reality, I was detached from any experience at all with war — and, lucky for me, violence period — but in my essay I remember trying to relay passion and a sense of urgency. These mythological people of the past possessed a selfless bravery and did their duty without pause, and that was compelling to me. The fact that many of them are still alive was also hard for me to wrap my little head around. I could never imagine people that I knew doing the same. Maybe it was because I couldn’t imagine anything traumatizing or chaotic or bad would ever happen to us, so I couldn’t imagine anyone needing to do these dramatic acts of heroism in the name of justice or protection — I simply had no context. These Very Bad things only happened to kids in Bosnia or Kosovo; these epic struggles and “good wars” and revolutions were reserved for the pages of my history textbooks.
Even after 9/11, which was indeed a shock to my preteen psyche and worldview, I did not have a real, tangible concept of this type of courage. I didn’t live in New York, and while I was moved by the harrowing images of first responders carrying people through thick clouds of dust, I still felt a dissociative distance, and with it a sort of survivors’ guilt. (Of course, within months I started a drive for Afghan refugees at my middle school, baby radical that I was.) Then, our nation fell into a war based on lies and fueled by xenophobia, and I attended antiwar marches in downtown Chicago with my dad and friends. The police generally left people alone (it’s worth noting that most marchers then were white). I did feel that something big and historic was happening, but still, I felt I was on the outside of it. My peers and I were able to live our lives with little interruption, shopping at Urban Outfitters and sliding down the handrails at the movie theatre. We certainly feared another terrorist attack, and the images of the planes gliding into the towers was seared into our memories, giving our generation a palpable collective anxiety. Still, there was no mandatory draft of our older brothers. The homefront was exempt from the horrors of war. In 2005, landmines only exploded overseas; dictators only ruled over countries thousands of miles away; illnesses like SARS were reserved for mentions in Kanye lyrics, while swine flu was a joke lobbed across high-school cafeteria tables and half-eaten ham sandwiches.
To say that things only got “real” in 2020 would be disingenuous. This year has been in the making for my entire 31 years of life, and well before it. Our march toward the Trump era was perhaps accelerated by 9/11, the 2008 recession, the “Tea Party” movement, and the ascension of social media as the most powerful tool to both polarize a country and spread dangerous misinformation. Still, we would get here eventually. The catastrophic and record-breaking wildfires were caused by not only climate change, itself a slow-burning fire over decades, but a neglect of strategies like controlled burns, used by Indigenous peoples for centuries. The mass protests to demand justice for George Floyd and countless other Black victims of police violence were borne out of a legacy of their brutality and anti-Blackness since the advent of our nation, which itself is literally built on institutionalized racism. (Slave-catchers were hired to patrol the Carolina colonies as early as 1704.) The mercilessly rising toll of Black people murdered by police has long been a simmering pot near overflow, with hashtag after hashtag putting a brighter spotlight on how common these avoidable tragedies are. And the tensions caused by the pandemic, themselves exposing deep racial inequities, helped put pressure behind that cannon. Perhaps most horrifically and predictably — doctors and scientists have been predicting a deadly and hyper-contagious pandemic for decades — our embarrassing lack of infrastructure and preparedness, not to mention our hyper-individualistic culture, had already written the story of COVID-19 in America as soon as the first case was detected in China. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, which felt like a sucker punch, was obviously impending — the lady was 87, for Chrissake. None of what’s happened in 2020 should really be a surprise.
For months now, we have grappled with mass scarcity and an unprecedented economic downturn, causing unemployment rates worse than those during the Great Depression. Businesses we thought would never close, like thriving urban restaurants or entertainment venues, have permanently shuttered. Within all of the logistical chaos and economic loss, it is frighteningly easy to lose sight of the fact that a staggering 232,000 people (as of today, November 3rd) have lost their lives to COVID-19. We can blame a large number of those lost souls on the abject failure of leadership within an administration more concerned with perpetuating disinformation and maintaining appearances than saving human lives. The Congresspeople who could have prioritized the health and safety of their constituents — the people who pay their salaries — over staying in the “good graces” of a cruel, Twitter-crazy despot, have displayed disgusting cowardice. This kind of cowardice not only comes from a life of entitlement, privilege, and perceived invincibility, but a deep moral corruption inherent to the Republican Party.
Because you know what? I, too, grew up entitled, privileged, and feeling invincible. But I also grew up idolizing everyday heroes who stood up for the vulnerable and fought back against their oppressors. My teachers taught me that to be on the right side of history was to stand up in the name of social justice. So I grew up respecting those who devoted their entire lives to justice, and striving to emulate the civil rights of past generations through my own service, activism, and work. And when the COVID-19 crisis came to my community, I stepped up, and I watched so many around me do the same. Who were they? Everyday, working-class, mostly young people. We found the courage to stare down riot police on our city streets, knowing they were shamelessly barbaric and could do whatever they wanted with little repercussion, even if their actions were captured on camera. Despite the then-unknown risk of infection from the crowds around us, we gathered together, masks on, and marched. We found the courage to dedicate time and energy to mutual aid efforts, organizing to deliver food, clothes, and resources to our vulnerable neighbors. We found the courage to vote in unprecedented numbers, because we knew the necessity of our voices in this moment, how our showing up could carry us and our descendants into a better future. Many of us who could have played it safe and mailed in our ballots saw how Republicans’ attempts to dismantle and delegitimize the Postal Service over the past few months may have complicated our vote being counted. So we early-voted in person instead, making sure that our vote was counted in front of our eyes. (Yes, any and every vote in a system bent on suppressing it is courageous; no, mailing in a ballot doesn’t make you a coward.)
What we ordinary people have shown this year is that extraordinary, mythical courage of our predecessors. Their losses were beyond our comprehension, so their heroic response also seemed incomprehensible — how they fearlessly organized, united in solidarity, and fought like hell — all while grieving, wounded, or hungry. It all makes sense to me now: extreme crisis demands extreme courage, which we the people always find within us. It certainly takes a village, and in a time when disconnection and human interaction is at an all-time high, we created that village. When I say we the people, mind you, I do not count the uber-rich who sold stocks a week before the mass shutdowns in March and have since escaped to their vacation homes. I do not count the oligarchs whose greed for money and power is at the core of their character. I do not count the white nationalists orchestrating voter intimidation or suppression campaigns, who are practically sanctioned by the Republicans. Those people will literally be the villains of future history texts. I mean, we, the true patriots, the majority of Americans, who fought to make our voices heard loud and clear tonight, and who give a shit about people outside of our own immediate nucleus of connections.
As I write, it is Tuesday evening and the polls are still open for another hour and a half. A friend reached out earlier to ask how I was doing. I responded that I felt “strangely zen.” In the week leading up to today, I’ve gotten an average of five hours of sleep a night and have had chest pains and upset stomach due to anxiety. But right now, I feel calm, even (dare I say) hopeful. To quell the anxiety, I have relied on calling my eligible, first-time student voters and seeing them through voter registration and preparing their ballots to voting. I am still dreading the worst outcome of this election, and will not let myself get too comfortable, as I did in 2016. I take nothing for granted, because nothing can be anymore. The new world order has made that clear.
And in return, we have made clear that we are the revolutionaries and patriots, up against obstacles not even our ancestors had. Our encounters with suffering this year have moved us to act, to help others, to lean in. And, like in nearly all the stories of past heroes, it is the young who have shown the most courage. The generations that have been written off as too stupid to resist eating $12 avocado toast or Tide-Pods have been the ones filling the streets to demand racial justice for people halfway across the country who we’ve never met. By spreading the movement to defund the uniformed bullies that are police, and fully expose their abuse of power in viral videos, we have launched a cascade of actual changes across the nation. We’ve largely been the ones heading up local mutual aid organizations, delivering groceries and raising money for rent assistance; we’ve signed up to be poll workers so that older, more vulnerable folks who normally work them can stay home. Nearly overnight, we became soldiers on the homefront. I could not be more proud of us.
No matter what happens tonight, we know we have what it takes to face what follows tomorrow, head on. We will continue to fight for our parents, ourselves, our children, and their children. We know what’s at stake, and we’ve proven that we’ve got a lot of fight in us. In the words of the poet June Jordan, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. And we are done waiting.
