“May You Rise To It”: A love letter to students in an unprecedented time
End of March, 2020
My dear students,
Let me say this first: I love you — and I hope all of you are somewhere safe right now.
I know this doesn’t find any of us well. This global pandemic has profoundly upended our lives and livelihoods and routines and responsibilities, to say nothing of our capacity to work and dream together to build a better world. The corona crisis has catapulted us into complete chaos, accompanied by a disorienting mix of emotions: fear and despair, anxiety and anger, uncertainty and longing, concern and compassion. If you are like me, you’re experiencing all these things at once on any given day. As one friend put it: “I didn’t realize I could have so many mood swings before my first cup of coffee.” As a historian, I rarely use the word unprecedented — after all, almost everything has some kind of precedent — but I dusted it off last week and have been using it more and more with each passing day. History will have time to take full account of this moment, but first we must survive it.
And I want to believe we will.
Over the last two weeks, I’ve been in touch with many of you, and I know you’re not okay: I know you’re freaking out; I know you’re feeling sick; I know you’re sad and disappointed and angry and anxious; I know you can’t afford to go home; I know you don’t feel safe at home; I know you don’t have a home or know where home is right now; I know your work life is precarious; I know you worry about being able to pay bills; I know you’re worried about money and financial aid and student loans and debt; I know you don’t know if you can go to school next year; I know you’re worried about visas; I know they’re closing borders and banning travel; I know you’re worried you won’t be able to come back; I know you want to stay here; I know you don’t want to stay here; I know you don’t have documentation; I know you’re worried about being targeted; I know you have pre-existing conditions; I know you’re more susceptible to this virus; I know you don’t have reliable health care; I know you’re on the front lines of this; I know you’re worried about your families, both given and chosen; I know you have to work and home school your kids; I know you can’t afford child care; I know you have to take care of your parents; I know your summer plans are cancelled; I know your first years and final years have been ruined; I know you don’t know what your acceptances mean right now; I know you don’t want to take classes online; I know you don’t have reliable internet access; I know you don’t want to continue taking classes at all; I know you worry about grades; I know you want to know why anyone is still giving grades; I know you’re mourning the loss of sports seasons and artistic productions, proms and parties, graduations and commencements; I know you don’t know what to do; I know none of this makes any sense; I know you feel like too many of our leaders are failing; I know you wish you had some warning; I know you still want to mobilize and organize and protest; I know you want to work on a campaign; I know you are worried about the election; I know you want to burn it down; I know you want to build something up; I know you want to be useful; I know you want to know when it will all be over; I know how many of you feel alone right now; and I know you are searching for some kind of hope. I am, too.
For what it’s worth — and I also know this isn’t nearly enough right now: I hear you.
To be honest, I know many more things about you than I ever knew a few weeks ago. I’m overwhelmed by it, too, but let me just say this: I’m here for you, whatever that means moving forward, because once you’re my student, you’re always my student. We’re all making this up as we go along right now — no one should pretend otherwise — including your teachers and administrators, who are trying their best, along with everyone else, to figure this madness out in real time, moment by moment. For the time being, let’s try to trust each other more than we have before, rely on each other as best we can, and ask each other for help however and whenever we need it. This is not the best time to work out pre-existing acrimonies and resentments and suspicions, as longstanding or legitimate as they may be. We have an opportunity, right now, to try to be the best version of ourselves. Never has a tired cliché been closer to the truth: we’re in this together.
Most of you probably don’t know how much I love to write letters. Back in the day, I wrote letters all the time. In middle school and high school, I often got in trouble for passing letters — and also talking too much — in class. (This is the real “origin story” of my communications “expertise”!) Both my grandmothers were legendary letter writers. My paternal grandmother — the Irish side — was a trailblazing educator, the oldest of sixteen immigrant children and first in our family to go to college, who wrote epic letters to her many siblings, students, and friends. She kept all their responses in shoeboxes in her dusty attic — an archive, of sorts, of their lives. (This was, in fact, the very first archive I ever discovered, after she passed away from cancer the spring of my freshman year of high school.) My maternal grandmother — the Italian side — was a tireless factory worker, a “cuffer” on the garment assembly line who earned her GED when I was a teenager, who wrote to me regularly when I was in college and graduate school. She always apologized for her handwriting and misspellings, but now I’m ashamed to say that I always spent the few dollars she tucked into each of those envelopes without keeping her letters or writing her back. (That archive, alas, is lost.) My resolution this new year was to write several letters each day, in part, as an overdue tribute to my late, beloved grandmothers, but also as a rebellion against our unrelentingly digital world. I promised myself I would hand-write regular affirmations — sincere expressions of gratitude — to the many people in my life who have made and sustained me over the years. I bought nice cards and cute stationary and fun stamps, and I wrote dozens of letters to friends and family in January and February, before life got too busy again. One rarely has the chance — or inclination — to renew one’s abandoned resolve, but as my mother likes to say: “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” Here we are.
My favorite type of letter is a love letter, the most recent of which is here, to my 10-year old niece Malia. She has not yet read it, but she will someday, when the time is right. My forthcoming book, Stonewall’s Children, is also a love letter of sorts — to the past, present, and future of queer folks. Only a few people have read the entire manuscript so far, but everyone will have the chance to do so when it’s published next year. By definition, love letters are usually private affairs, and most of them don’t see the light of day, if they ever do, until long after they’re written. (I wonder how many love letters have died in dusty attics — or draft folders?) I suspect people are afraid to write them because they’re afraid to be vulnerable, exposed or “outed” in some way, which is perfectly understandable yet profoundly tragic. Fear always is. But then, without warning, an unprecedented fear hits us all in real time, and we realize we cannot wait for the ideal time. To be honest, I wish everyone would write a love letter to someone right now. More than ever, I believe love letters — both private and public — can sustain us, even save us, at a time when fear threatens to undo us.
If you couldn’t already tell, this is my love letter to all of you.
Because I’m your teacher, I want to respond to — repay, reciprocate — the things you have shared with me and taught me in the past few weeks. In her recent book, Can We Solve the Migration Crisis?, my dear friend and colleague Jacqueline Bhabha, citing the two characters that constitute a single word, reminds us that “crisis,” in Chinese, is both danger and opportunity. We are rightly preoccupied right now with the dangers associated with this crisis, which are serious and many. But let me focus instead on the opportunities it affords us to build community, find compassion, and stay critical. In the absence of a vaccine or cure, which we know will be slow in coming, these are the best antidotes we have to get us through this current crisis.
As you know, I have always believed that the classroom can and should be a community. Throughout my teaching career over the last 25 years, I have tried to cultivate and curate this as best I can, and we’ve built community together over and over again. We have done so by getting to know each other, giving each other equal air time, listening as much as we talk, devoting ourselves to the work, and respecting each other’s different perspectives and opinions, even and especially when we don’t understand or agree with them. We haven’t always done this perfectly — I’ll be the first to admit my own mistakes and missteps along the way — but we’ve worked hard at this for a very long time now. This has been one of the great blessings of my life, and it has taught me many invaluable lessons that I am leaning hard on to get me through this. Classroom community is obviously easier to foster when we’re face-to-face, in the same space over a sustained period of time. This is the magic that makes education worth its frustrations and imperfections, even in the best of circumstances. In this time, which is hardly that, when we are confined to virtual spaces for the foreseeable future, building community is a powerful and profound challenge. For what it’s worth, my colleagues, myself included, are doing our best to adapt to these difficult times and damn technologies, as are you, with little warning on an unforgiving timeline. For what it’s worth, never in my life have I seen more educators — at every level, in every place I teach and well beyond them — reaching out to one another for ideas and support. As students, you should know this. Please have patience with your teachers, and find ways to connect with us to keep this education going. Frankly, I see this as an unprecedented opportunity, a silver lining of sorts, for all of us to enlist each other in re-imagining teaching and learning on every level. As tempting as it may be for both students and teachers to give up on classes right now — to call it a semester and hope for a “do over” or “reset” next year — I think this is actually an ideal time, in less than ideal circumstances, to transform our classrooms into the communities we want and need and deserve. Perhaps this is even a moment to flatten a different kind of curve: the ancient hierarchies and arbitrary evaluations, the unnecessary competitions and unhelpful conflicts, that so often get in the way of building the best and bravest classroom communities. In this time of “social distancing,” which also threatens to be a time of isolation and alienation for so many people, let’s log on rather than check out. As I have witnessed time and again these past few weeks — through FaceTime check-ins with family, Zoom happy hours with friends, Google organizing calls with fellow activists, GoTo webinars and Facebook Live events with strangers and kindred souls, and all sorts of sessions on all these platforms with many of you — these virtual spaces can produce real communities if we’re willing to stay connected to each other and do this hard work together.
The strongest communities are rooted in compassion. Even before this virus hit, a common claim had caught hold: “this country has never been more polarized.” As a historian of politics and social movements in the United States, I have been quick to counter this claim, asking people if they’ve ever read the fierce Constitutional debates of the late 18th century that gave birth to the nation, or if they’ve ever studied the ferocious debates over slavery in the 19th century that brought the nation to its brink, or if they’ve ever heard of, say, the 1930s or 1960s or 1980s or 2000s. While historically accurate — we’ve definitely been polarized before, and there’s ample precedent to prove this — my “push back” is also, on some level, I suppose, an act of intellectual and political arrogance. (It depends on the tone and the day.) But for what it’s worth, though sometimes snarky, it is intended to trump (as it were) those who live foolishly in the present without regard for the past, or those who long feverishly for a past that never really existed. After all, navel gazing and nostalgia, when left to their own devices, are always dangerous. That said, there is no denying that we’re living in an age where the pendulum of public discourse has been swinging aggressively back and forth between various poles of identity and ideology and inequality. I have certainly taken my turn, whenever I had the opportunity, to push the pendulum hard in the direction I prefer. I don’t apologize for this, since I’ve spent too much of my life playing Sisyphus. (You’ll have to excuse me for mixing metaphors, it’s a weird time.) One response to these severe pendulum swings, so common in our schools these days, is the call for “civility,” as if this should be the mandatory “middle ground,” a requirement for our continued inclusion and belonging, rather than a serious moral aspiration that needs to be hard earned, especially by those who have not yet done their share of the pushing when it comes to things like equality, freedom, rights, and justice. (Or bending, if you prefer to quote Dr. King, as so many seem to do, on the “arc of the moral universe.”) That said, this unprecedented moment in history demands not superficial calls for “civility,” which can sometimes feel like a weapon used to silence, but a more serious commitment to compassion. And by this, I mean more consistent attempts at deep understanding and acts of loving empathy that can lead us in the direction of sustained solidarity with people who are suffering — in this immediate instance, those who have been diagnosed with COVID-19; those who have already died or lost loved ones; first responders and other essential workers who are on the frontlines of this crisis; anyone whose basic needs of food, water, work, wages, housing, and health care are not being met; those who are always more susceptible to disease and death during times like these precisely because they’ve never had their fair share of these things; and folks who have not yet endured this crisis but surely will. I have been thinking a lot recently about the AIDS crisis, which decimated the LGBTQ community during the 1980s and 1990s, when I was growing up, and has plagued the globe ever since. One of the reasons HIV/AIDS became a pandemic in the first place is because those who were most deeply affected — infected, “positive” — were stigmatized as social pariahs, disposable people. This is still the case with too many people in too many places. For the greater part of a decade during the so-called “Reagan era,” there was a deadly lack of compassion (and political action) for “those people,” many of whom, it turns out, were my people. Though dangerous, and devastating in its death toll, the AIDS crisis in its early stages also produced an opportunity for queer people to act up and demand everything from basic human recognition and rights to antiretroviral drugs and real political power. As Prior Walter declares at the end of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a play that quite literally saved my life in those days: “This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away.” During that time, as I have learned from my elders, our community was certainly not without conflict, even “incivility.” Nevertheless, we found a way to be compassionate with ourselves and care for one another at a time when no one else would. This is one reason why many of us, though not nearly all, were eventually able to survive that plague. It’s also why the LGBTQ community has something to teach the nation and the world right now about how to find compassion in the midst of crisis. When it comes to matters of life and death, we can ill afford to close the borders of understanding, empathy, and solidarity at the boundaries of identity, ideology, and inequality. If ever there were a time to be compassionate bridge builders and boundary crossers, this is it.
As radically committed as we should be in this moment to building community and finding compassion, we must also stay critical. The corona crisis has inspired many exhortations to “not make this political.” On some level, I suppose, I understand the intention behind this. The last thing we should do right now is search for any and every excuse to fight for its sake, and we should certainly resist any peer pressure to root for folks to fail. That said, the call to avoid politics in this moment is not only the wrong message, it’s a dangerous one. This is especially true for those of us who care about history and government, leadership and communications, social movements and human rights, race and class, gender and sexuality, public service and global development, or any of the other things we have studied together over the last generation. Moments of crisis, whether “natural” or human-made, always place into sharp relief the pre-existing conditions of inequality and injustice in any given society. Whenever people experience widespread anxiety and suffering due to something like a pandemic, access to basic human needs — food and water, housing and medicine, work and pay — depends on where we are already positioned in the always vicious and often violent hierarchies that structure our world. And whenever basic human needs are not being provided or protected, human rights are being violated. Many recent commentators have been quick to point out that coronavirus is a “great equalizer,” citing well-known celebrities and other well-positioned “elites” who have tested positive alongside “ordinary people.” But the deeper truth is that this pandemic is a great un-equalizer. Its most devastating ravages — at once physical, material, and emotional — will disproportionately impact those who are most vulnerable: those who are immunocompromised or incarcerated; those who are living in poverty or lacking in health care; those who are stateless or undocumented or housing insecure; those who routinely experience discrimination or isolation; those who are unemployed or working paycheck to paycheck. In the current case of the coronavirus, these things are abundantly clear. What’s also clear is that our most powerful institutions — governments and civil society organizations, hospitals and schools, militaries and marketplaces — are inadequately prepared and ill-equipped to deal with this most recent global health crisis. This is no time to retreat from politics or trade in false equivalencies when it comes to our elected officials or political parties. Indeed, it is also no time to think that just because we are all in this together that we are in this together in the same way. Just as pre-existing health conditions make some people more susceptible to illness, pre-existing social conditions (including health) make some people more vulnerable to everything — especially in times of crisis. And all of this is political. We are living through a global case study, in real time, where protagonists and antagonists, failures and successes, injustices and inequalities, power and privilege, best practices and worst practices are already revealing themselves. Make no mistake, this is a generation-defining moment in world history, unprecedented in real ways, and your generation will inherit whatever is to come. You will have to confront the big questions about the size and scope of governments, the rights and responsibilities of citizens, the distribution of resources and capacity of markets, the morality of systems that sort and separate us, the sustainability of our way of life, the undeniable interconnectedness of us all, and so many other things that impact people and the planet we struggle to share. The sooner you gain clarity and muster bravery in the face of all this the better. I want to believe we’ll survive this moment because we still have so much more work to do. For what it’s worth, I promise to be with you in that work for as long as I am still here.
I have started and stalled and circled back to this letter for more than a week now. To be perfectly honest, I have never felt less useful in all my life than I do in this moment. But I am a teacher, so let me close with all I got: I love you and want you to be okay.
During times of crisis, I always find my way home again to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. I first encountered this book a generation ago, shortly after Baldwin himself went to his final home. I was around the age some of you are now. Over those many years, for a variety of reasons, it has become something of a sacred text for me. I am certainly not alone in this. After re-reading it last week for what seems like the hundredth time, I want to share the passage that my husband CJ and I chose as a reading for our wedding almost nine years ago:
“It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant — birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so — and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface, but in the depths — change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not — safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope — the entire possibility — of freedom disappears.”
Four constants: birth, death, struggle, love. Birth we have, death will come, and the struggle, of course, continues. Love is ours to choose. And choose it we must — because you, dear students, are my hope for the deep change we need in this unprecedented time.
May you rise to it.
Love always, Tim
— —
Timothy Patrick McCarthy is Lecturer on History and Literature, Public Policy, and Education at Harvard University, where he is Core Faculty at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He is also the Stanley Paterson Professor of American History in the Boston Clemente Course in the Humanities, Scholar-in-Residence at Blair Academy, and Visiting Professor of Public Service and Social Justice at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service. An award-winning scholar, educator, and activist, Dr. McCarthy is the recipient of the 2019 Manuel C. Carballo Award, the Harvard Kennedy School’s highest teaching honor.
