On campus, the unease around each corner keeps my stomach in a knot. Graduate students, stymied by ‘stop-work’ orders and dark data archives wonder how their careers will progress. Faculty colleagues scramble to find ways to pay their research staff in the face of funding freezes. International students worry about being swept up in indiscriminate immigration raids even though their visas are in order. Now today, news today that a recent UNC graduate was among those lost in the Potomac.
Off campus, things feel equally grim. Yesterday, my husband was at a car dealership. The employee he was working with was interrupted by a call from his brother. The brother, distraught about how he would support his young family, had been laid off by the National Forest Service. Friends text that they have been “furloughed” from non-profits where they’ve worked for years. And this is just my small corner of the world.
Over lunch, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of figure skating videos. Skaters all in black mourning their lost teammates. Beautiful skaters whose grace and devotion to their sport translates, at least today, into tears adding salt to my PB&J.
In some domains, like research, news articles provide strange morsels of potential solace. Maybe the funding pauses are the result of a poorly executed presidential transition. If the pause doesn’t go beyond two weeks, all will be well. Tell that to the souls reliant on the soup kitchens in Sudan that have shuttered their doors. There are so many consequences for so many.
And yet, I keep counting the days hoping the articles are right. Today is day 12 post inauguration. How long will it take to get better? Two weeks, two months?
No matter my own strategies for coping – headlines in small doses, trying to focus on everyday pleasures, putting my head down and doing my work – my mind wanders back to what it must feel like to be a federal worker suddenly cast out. To wonder whether the non-profit where you’ve spent your professional life will at least pay your health insurance in coming months. How it must feel to have lost your child, your fiancé, your partner, your friend in a terrible plane crash and have the President blaming DEI?
In all of the “disruption,” this new crew likes so well, human suffering has been so trivialized, so quickly.
Right now, the hope lives only in my head: people have been through bad times before. The chaos can’t go on forever. etc. etc. Clichés which are in some part true. Yet, in my heart,- my true gauge of well-being – I am uneasy. The stomach stays tight. The concentration is poor. Perpetually braced for whatever comes next.
*Photograph is by skylarsearing.com
Thank you, Professor Chapman, for writing again. I’ve missed your commentaries. This post, as always, is excellent.
Thank you so much. I appreciate the kind words.
Thanks for giving some of my feelings words, Mimi, because it feels often as if there aren’t any to describe what I see, read, and feel. Keeping hope alive for all in whatever ways we can.
Thank you so much for reading and commenting.
You named exactly what I am feeling. How to cope? What to do? I have no idea. I’m overwhelmed.
Thank you, Mimi. I never thought I’d see such tragedy being normalized by my usual trusted sources. It’s truly a dark time.
Sure miss seeing you on campus. Thanks for commenting.