Revisiting The Last Normal Week Meme
What a viral Facebook meme tells us about collective trauma and our current reality.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This newsletter originally ran last March. I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last week since I expected this meme to resurface, and it was nowhere to be seen. Reading over this again, I was obviously far too optimistic that the American Electorate would want to move America forward instead of backward, but I think my points about us continuing to avoid all of the collective trauma from the pandemic and Trump 1.0 still resonate. And probably explain a lot about how we got back here. Hopefully, it resonates with you as well.
You might have seen this meme on Facebook and Instagram this week. It was a constant presence on my Facebook feed. The meme is meant to mark four years since everything began to shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I assume, inspired by Facebook’s On This Day feature that shows users' posts from the same date in years past. There were several variations of the meme, but most were simple, like the graphic above.
I’ve noticed that conversations about the week before have become common in my social and professional circles. It’s in the same vein as where were you on 9/11 or where were you when JFK was assassinated? The week before is a unifying event that all Americans experienced. I’ve also learned that most folks who share their story experienced one or more seismic life changes during the pandemic. Losing loved ones, moving to a new location, and everything in between. We all seem to have a version of that story, and I always find them fascinating.
At the same time, I bristle at the idea that this was the week that changed everything. At least in America. In early 2020, we were in the 4th year of Donald Trump’s first term in the White House. Things hadn’t been normal for quite some time, and a seismic cultural and political shift had already taken place. One of my memories from that week is how quickly the American news cycle went from being dominated by all things Trump -- with multiple breaking news stories a day -- to being dominated by the pandemic. For me, at least, the news became easier to follow because it focused on just one thing for a couple of months.
Trump’s presidency and the MAGA movement that supports him undoubtedly made the pandemic worse for Americans. He was unable and unwilling to unify us in the way we expect the American President to do when faced with a global pandemic. He was also unable and unwilling to use the pandemic preparation plan created by the previous administration. Rather than tap into the Federal Government’s knowledge and institutional memory on public health, Trump’s son-in-law sourced research from a Facebook group of ER physicians. Trump encouraged the anti-mask protest movement, and refused to wear a mask himself most of the time. He refused to advocate all that hard for the vaccine, even though its development was one of his Administration’s few wins. Trump wouldn’t even follow the CDC’s recommendations in the White House or when he caught the virus. We’ll never know how many lives were lost as a result of the Trump Administration’s negligence and opportunism.
The pandemic didn’t create new cultural or political divides but was a handy wedge for making them worse. Exposure to and belief in conspiracy theories increased substantially, from anti-vaxxers to QAnon. Wearing masks and getting vaccinated became cultural cues, with MAGA supporters refusing to take the vaccine and those of us on the left (myself included) saw masking and getting the jab as virtues. Existing health disparities and inequities remained unaddressed, and marginalized communities were disproportionately affected. Additionally, Black Americans were “immersed in three structural and avoidable major crises: the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, a debilitating economic recession, and a fiery racial justice uprising.” And, of course, Trump and MAGA used the uprising around George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to further stoke division and incite violence.
The sudden onset of pre-pandemic nostalgia also struck me because I’ve long thought that Americans have spent the last year and some change in a weird state of denial. Instead of learning from the past and trying to build a stronger future, we’re determined to get “back to normal” by any means necessary. It’s as if we’re trying to forget the global pandemic happened at all, along with all the events that contributed to making it such a catastrophe. We don’t want to talk about how to ensure this doesn’t happen again because we’re not able to examine the collective trauma or the toll it took on all of us.
On a personal level, I get it. The early days of the pandemic were some of the most painful in my life, and that entire period isn’t something I enjoy revisiting. But as a society, we can’t continue to avoid it or pretend it never happened. We will certainly experience tragedies as a nation again. And there’s no doubt that the same movement that did everything in their power to exploit the pandemic for their own gain will attempt to exploit the next collective trauma to further their authoritarian aims as well.
I suspect part of the current ambivalence about a Trump and Biden rematch comes from this. A rematch means we’ll be forced to talk about the past as we examine both men’s records. Revisiting the pandemic, and all of the ways elected officials made a tragedy worse is inevitable. We keep trying to push the memories away, only to have the same candidates from four years ago bring it all back up again.
It’s interesting that as the last normal week of our lives meme is popping online, the media post-Super Tuesday finally seems to have resigned itself to the fact that yes, this election will be Trump vs. Biden again, yes, we’re going to have to remember just how catastrophic Trump and his administration was for the world, and yes, Trump is still vulnerable in the same ways he was in 2020. The timing is coincidental but perhaps if people are ready to engage on how Covid impacted their lives, they’re also ready to acknowledge what a danger letting Donald Trump back in the White House again is for humanity. And engage in the election accordingly.
I’ll end with the last few words of the meme: of our lives. Which acknowledges that we’re forever changed and that we can’t go back to normal even if we wanted to. The pandemic took a lot from us, but I would argue that Trump and the MAGA movement’s exploitation of it took a whole lot more.
ICYMI
Elon Musk Targeted Me Over Tesla Protests. That Proves Our Movement is Working (The Guardian)
Elon Musk’s harassment is predictable. Valerie Costa, who Musk targeted last week by name, takes his attacks as proof that #TeslaTakedown is working. Here’s her story, in her own words.
Two Transgender Girls, Six Federal Agencies. How Trump Is Trying to Pressure Maine Into Obedience. (ProPublica)
I was disheartened last week by how many readers wrote to defend Gavin Newsom’s podcast platforming MAGA, and, in particular, his position on trans athletes in sports. It honestly made me question what newsletter some of y’all think you’ve been reading. I still don’t think the MAGA framing on this is legitimate but for those of you with concerns, I think this piece from ProPublica articulates what the actual numbers are.
The 200+ Sites an ICE Surveillance Contractor is Monitoring (404 media)
This kind of surveillance happens more than people realize. I’m not surprised to learn that ICE is hiring contractors who do this kind of work, and I suspect most people don’t realize how common this kind of thing is becoming in law enforcement.
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As I mentioned Sunday, I took this week off for some family stuff. Normal publication will resume next week. Take care!
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COVID started early for me. On January 11, 2020, we'd just gotten home from spending Christmas month at our second home in Santa Fe. That day, I was diagnosed with an ovarian cyst the size of a grapefruit. The ultrasound image sported a suspicious shadow that looked distinctly cancerous. The doctor confined me to the couch (lest the cyst burst and spread cancer throughout my body), and set me up for surgery on February 11.
From that couch -- already quarantined, in effect, though I didn't know it yet -- I watched the pandemic roll ashore in the US on my laptop. In late January, the first US case cropped up just 15 miles from my home in Seattle. Then the first superspreader event, 10 miles up the road. Then the first institutional spread, three miles across the lake. By the 25th, I'd begun to brace for the worst, and warn my friends. The Amazon boxes of alcohol, bunny suits, masks, and sanitizer started piling up in the basement. I'm a futurist by trade. I can read an exponential graph -- and I knew by instinct what was coming. It's my job not to be caught by surprise by this stuff. And I was not.
The surgery went off without a hitch. There was no cancer. (And I'm still here, and fine.) But I did need to spend another couple weeks on the couch recovering from a major abdominal operation. By the time I was back up and around, Seattle was shutting down all around me. I had just a few days to see friends and say goodbye. I had my last lunch out on February 29. We made a final Costco run, then came home around sunset and shut the door behind us for the last time.
We were ahead of the curve because Seattle ran about three weeks ahead of the rest of the country. By the time everybody else had caught up to our reality, in mid-March, we'd already shuttered churches and schools, fortified our hospitals, put the entire University of Washington onto online-only footing, canceled mass events and banned public gatherings, and had put the world's first vaccine injection (the one we'd come to know as Moderna) into the arm of a Seattle nurse. To my East Coast friends, I sounded like a lunatic. But I was just living 21 days in the future that they'd soon be forced to reckon with. By the Ides of March, it came to them, too.
We didn't get back to the Santa Fe house for a year and a half. When we finally returned in August 2021, my husband went into his small office and booted up the desktop computer. He was stunned at what appeared on his screen: a Safari page, loaded with tabs -- most dated the first week of January 2020, all about a mysterious virus coming out of China, and how nobody knew what it might mean.
It felt like a missive from past world we didn't even know how to remember, like reading our grandparents' letters from WWII. Whatever world we had before, it was that long ago, and had about the same chance of ever coming back.