This Month’s 5 Questions is a composite of historians, artists, and commentators.

Compiled by Dwight Easter

Proper Plumbing

by Zach Gehring

There are particular issues I could explore, but the unfortunately unique dimension of 2020 is not only the very tragic events that have impacted so many (especially Black folks, people of color, and the elderly) but also the disruption in informational plumbing.

The habitual patterns of our lives depend upon our ability to manage flows of information. Our routines play out within the management of these flows - spurred and managed by plumbing. Lack of proper plumbing causes stink, sickness, additional undue stress, and it's financially draining.

We are currently experiencing a lack of proper plumbing. The flows of information, which typically pass through our filter at a pace that allows for discernment, selective absorption, dismissal, focus, etc., have stifled and accumulated at our feet – a basement flooded since April. The impact of this stagnation is exposed in full relief. We are in a daily collision with the tumultuous dynamic of information, uncertainty, and powerlessness — drowning. All the while, numerous sadists with Medium accounts encourage us to smile, be thankful, and take advantage of our newly afforded "free time".

To reflect on the pandemic's impact is to try making sense of a reflexive, compounding, and consistently shifting amalgam of fuck-all. To focus on one stress immediately reminds you of another - and addressing one stress leaves you vulnerable to the other(s). Under "normal" conditions, these might be fewer and easier to manage. However, currently, every family and every individual is dealing with a constant cascade of anxiety, depression, guilt, racial & economic injustice, symbolic & very physical state violence, financial vulnerability, insensitivity, reckless endangerment at the hands of public leaders, stupidity, and the grotesque residue of "American" brand "freedom," – the USA "normal" mutated by COVID-19.

To be sure, these aren't newly emerging phenomena. The critical point is that this pooling water exposes the incessant and soul-impoverishing demand of our daily pre-COVID lives which nurtured a docility that has long reinforced the prohibitive structures and patterns of forces that many of us (especially the more privileged of us) are only now being exposed to more directly. The assault of information during this fragmented quarantine has become a debilitating complement to the material inequality and imbalances that contextualize our daily lives.

This 2020 version of fatigue is constituted by a condition, a symptom, and an imposition — and we're trying our best to manage it while being reminded every day that we could be doing it better, that maybe we're doing it wrong, that we're failing as parents, partners, & employees, that we're not nurturing our mental health enough or in the right way, that we should be reading more, developing our hobby, finding a side hustle, knitting, exercising, working more, writing, ad infinitum. We are being sold methods & practices that reinforce insecurities that the pandemic has aggravated - insecurities often rooted in externally imposed and subsequently internalized expectations of output and presentation; expectations of blanket gratitude and joy (all toxic). It should come as no surprise that our modes of coping during this time are being preyed upon and used to undermine our own efforts. The impact is deleterious.

Our fatigue is not static. It does not originate from a single force or cause. It is a thriving, gluttonous, and surrounding external force upon us. In her recent column in the New York Times, Jennifer Senior quotes psychologist Daphne de Marneffe who emphasizes that trauma is not only born from a discrete event, but "helplessness about being on the receiving end of forces you can't control." Under the duress of quarantine, we are constantly feeling the effects of those forces with little assurance that it will end anytime soon. The uncertainty and helplessness roots deeper. We are, well...I am drowning.

About Dwight Easter: Digital folk artist, family man and bread merchant. Some of the best moments in my life are experiencing the power and influence of great art. I came up in the Norfolk era of the M80’s, Buttsteak, and Antic Hay.