The Last Normal Week?

What a viral Facebook meme about this week four years ago tells us about collective trauma and the 2024 election.

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. 

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ICYMI

Meta is Already Failing to Enforce Its New AI Policy (FWIW)

From my COURIER colleague Kyle Tharp. I know you’re shocked that Meta, the company behind Facebook, isn’t enforcing its own policy on AI and election ads.

Going Somewhere? (Mom Left)

I highly recommend Kelly Weil’s newsletter on the place where parenting and progressive politics intersect. Weill has reported on conspiracy theorists and right-wingers for years, and this piece on how QAnon conspiracy-mongering and rhetoric have infected the reproductive freedom movement is a fascinating read. 

The Courts Were Never Going to Save America From Donald Trump (Vox)

“No one is coming to save us — not the courts, not the Constitution, and certainly not a process for choosing candidates that has not been used since the 1960s. Donald Trump will be defeated, if at all, in November at the ballot box. The only thing his opponents can do to make that happen is to vote for Joe Biden, and to encourage others to do the same. There is no other solution.” 

“This is Just Weird”: Buzzfeed News’ Former Royals Reporter on Kate Middleton, Palace PR, and Distrust in the Media (Nieman Labs)

Kate Middleton conspiracies are fascinating to me. Especially since it seems like her press team is stoking them rather than putting out the fire. (As I wrote on LinkedIn, it’s a case study on what not to do to debunk misinformation.)

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Coda

Congratulations to COURIER, which hit one million subscribers this week. It’s an incredible milestone that CARD is proud to play a small role in. 

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That’s all for this week. Be sure to catch next week’s newsletter as I have something really cool planned. See you again on Sunday!