Imagine driving down a dirt road through a garden filled with flowers. You might feel compelled to “stop and smell the roses,” as the saying goes. This garden, though, is different. When you step out of the car, smoke fills the air, and you realize that the roses are on fire. All of them.
But we cannot fathom saving every rose; we’ve been told that it’s not possible to do it all. Instead, we grab one rose from the edge of the garden and extinguish the fire that once engulfed it. Holding that one saved rose, we feel a sense of normalcy and content. But the garden is still on fire.
The one rose is the extinguished administration. The garden’s fire is the engulfed nation beyond it. My worry, though, is that we’re going to think that the ending of that fire, and the normal we’ve attributed to it, will convince us that all the roses are safe.
For we must question this normal. Our normal was still racism. Normal was pernicious xenophobia. Normal was persistent police brutality. Though I understand how refreshing it might feel to have an administration that speaks in full, dignified sentences, the fire is far from gone.
But normal is all we will get, even as U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s Nov. 7 victory speech promised America that we are at an inflection point. “There is nothing that America has tried to do and couldn’t,” he said. This forceful hope was the driving ideology behind his campaign, that America was going to return to normal.
The exhale of relief when hearing Joe’s soft, normal voice precisely spurs complacency and complicity. Because it means four years of uniting a nation that does not want to be united. Being a president for those who “voted for” and “those who didn’t,” in Biden’s words, is four years of putting those who do not want to be together in one room and expecting progress. Things will be better with one rose extinguished, but the garden is still on fire.
After all, no matter what, perfection eludes us no matter what normal comes and goes. Want full universal healthcare? You can’t have that. Want to stop corporations from dumping oil to preserve the Earth? Perhaps by 2060. Want to stop plundering other nations? Impossible, how ridiculous to suggest that. Want to have the same, if not better, quality of life as generations before you? It is the way it is.
But, you see, I’ve listed issues without giving any tangible solutions in the face of the solution that normalcy offers. To not have answers, though, is okay in a nation that isn’t asking the right questions. A nation that doesn’t recognize the garden is on fire. Gesturing to the flames is the first start.
Reimagining solutions simply by beginning with a criticism is what Sheldon Wolin, a former professor and activist at Berkeley University, calls political vision, detailed by Joel Olsen in his book, “The Abolition of White Democracy.” Political vision is “the means by which we criticize the values of society and transcend them by imagining a new society and better values.”
Normalcy by abandoning our critiques, forcing ourselves to protect America by uniting racists and antiracists, undermines the progress we’ve made towards pointing to the engulfed garden and saying “enough.”
Precisely, the next four years threaten to force America into a slumber of granting this “normal” as a place to stop. Stopping here, though, is what we have always done. Our nation is riddled with the history of accepting the bad as a natural outcome of history. The political imagination of our nation has always been restricted by what we’ve been told is possible and what we’ve been told is unfeasible.
Here’s the thing: Our generation, if we truly want to return to the trend of having a better quality of life than the ones who came before us, must begin the tread uphill into the political imagination of the unfeasible.
Political reimagination is the start, even if it does not offer a solution. As a mere 20 year old, I for sure don’t have any of them. And that’s okay. Rather than trying to solve all of our world’s problems within the space of solutions that are granted to us, it is equally as useful and crucial to criticize the space that we have been restricted to. Whether that is small-scale like standing up to problematic rhetoric of the University of Oregon’s administration, or as large as demanding that the capitalist system be dismantled for one that puts the priorities of future generations first, we have to start somewhere. For us, it is more dangerous to spend time accepting what we are told to accept than to simply reimagine what is possible. Frankly, we don’t have time for it anymore.
To spend time in the field of roses and dust the soot off of one rose might make us feel better. After all, it is nice to hold one healthy flower in our hands and call it good if we believe we cannot save every rose in the garden. That is the normal that we are currently being promised. Political reimagination, for the next generations, requires us to not just save one flower, but to look at the field on fire and dedicate ourselves to conceiving of solutions that save all of them, not just one.