For me and many others, Covid-19 has been the age of ScreenTime™ to a level which my prior life could never rival. Every morning I wake up to the sound of my phone alarm and lazily scroll through Instagram and the news until I feel ready to conquer the day. Then, I commute to the kitchen to power on my laptop and dive into work, taking occasional breaks to check my text messages or social media before ending the day with some Office reruns and maybe a movie.
I am SO plugged in – to a degree which I have never been before! And every day, as I invest more and more energy into “plugging in” to these outlets, I feel less and less “plugged in” to life outside the screen. The temptation to drown out the stresses and happenings of the world by engaging in more and more screen time, disengaging from the rest of reality, is increasingly prevalent as the world gets more noisy and the screens, more accessible.
But, this mentality is inherently privileged to its core. There is an old adage going around the internet right now that is essentially something along the lines of “silence is compliance;” to disengage is to fight againstthe fighters; to be complicit in the evils that are coming to light by choosing to sit out as opposed to choosing to step in. And not everyone has this choice. Whether in work or in the “real world”, the ability to choose to disengage is a privilege entitled to only those for whom the work or the fight is not necessary for their liberation.
In work, this looks like an uninterested undergraduate student “checking out” during an important lab meeting because the conversation is over their head and they feel they have nothing to contribute or learn, while the rest of the lab works hard to try and solve an important problem. Though a lot is at stake for the lab as a whole, the undergraduate student will be relatively unaffected, and is therefore capable of inattention, as the outcome is not directly tied to him.
In life, this looks like a white person choosing to ignore the fight for racial justice, or a man refusing to listen to women speaking up about gender inequality, simply because they are able to disengage from the conversations.
Not only is such disengagement contingent on certain privileges the individual in question must hold, but it also shows a disregard for those peers and colleagues who do not have the same privileges; for whom disengagement is not an option.
This time of quarantine has been difficult, both as a country and as individuals, and sometimes the allure of inaction really does tempt me into wanting to check out and just take a break from reality. However, I am cognizant that my ability to do so rests on the inherent privileges which I hold as a white, female, university student. There are some conversations which I am able to disengage from, and others in which I find myself fully entangled. As the month comes to a close and the pandemic continues, I am choosing to remain engaged and join the conversation. Both on a global and smaller scale, my ability to choose disengagement allows me the same ability to choose engagement, involvement, and action. For the next 2 weeks of this fellowship (and hopefully longer!) may we all choose to fight the temptation of apathy and actively engage in every conversation, assignment, and mission for justice we find ourselves facing.