{"id":6142,"date":"2020-04-27T14:12:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-27T18:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/?p=6142"},"modified":"2020-04-27T14:38:56","modified_gmt":"2020-04-27T18:38:56","slug":"of-face-masks-umbrellas-and-thunderbolts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/2020\/04\/27\/of-face-masks-umbrellas-and-thunderbolts\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Face-Masks, Umbrellas, and Thunderbolts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Dota Szymborska<\/strong>, philosopher, sociologist, TEDx speaker, and AI expert, and Tomasz Kitlinski<\/strong>, political philosopher, activist, and curator (Open City Festival of Public Art in Lublin on Hospit-ALTER-ity)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are veterans. Went on strike in high school?\nOf course. Political activity in college?\nSure. Later: complicated political paths, demonstrations, performances,\nand plenty of engaged writings. Sometimes fear\nfor one\u2019s life: threats\nand hate speech\nthat did not necessarily grow out of our \ufb01ght for freedom.\nNo regrets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything is more arduous during a pandemic.
In “normal times” we take placards, umbrellas, lea\ufb02ets and go. Now we stay at home. We decorate balconies with black umbrellas. We are privileged — we live in large cities. On the 4th or 7th \ufb02oor our umbrellas are hardly visible. No one will throw eggs. We are grateful to those who live in small towns or in the countryside, where a poster in the window or an umbrella on the balcony is a mark of courage. It is a declaration, a heads-up!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything is harder in a pandemic.
Posters and umbrellas are like the white arrows painted during WWII bombings to tell citizens where the shelter is \u2013 today we know where brave and good people live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But how come \u2013 after 30 years of democracy \u2013 our bodies, women\u2019s\nbodies \u2013 are still hostage to a ruling party that wants to exercise total\ncontrol over us? \u201cWe\u2019re a free people,\u201d shouted Polish women in 1989 \u2013 the\nmothers of today\u2019s feminism. We defended our reproductive laws in 2016 thanks\nto mass umbrella performances. There was to be a \u201cBlack Friday\u201d demonstration\nand masses of people turned out on the streets of Poland despite a heavy rain.\nAnd it was the black umbrellas that immediately became a sign of resistance. We\ndid not win a spectacular victory; at that time it was a battle of survival to\nsalvage the minimal rights we still had. We could easily have lost whatever\nfreedom was left, but we managed to save at least a bare minimum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those concerted actions\nof women and\ntheir allies in 2016 exposed\nthe oppressive qualities of the new regime,\nwhich had come to power\nless than a year before.\nDemocracy should not hurt its citizens but should respect\nthem. It has\nto respect women\u2019s choices. That dramatic and\nimaginative 2016 mobilization within the framework of an almost 30-year-old\ndemocracy was indeed performative, and it worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in 2020,\nPoland\u2019s democracy is already vanishing. The current regime,\nwith its autocratically self-righteous decision-making practices, is uncannily mirroring the social silencing policies of the Communist regime\nexperienced by our society 40 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So now we ask: where are we, as a society, heading?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the way from \u201cSolidarity\u201d to a pandemic, we have ceased to be social actors: at best we are \u201cextras\u201d. Education reform: \u201cthey\u201d have written new history textbooks. Pandemic: \u201cthey\u201d have imposed restrictions on our freedom, yet without imposing a state of emergency, or a state of disaster, as required by law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As veterans, we can see\nwhat is going\non. Our duty\nis to explain, to talk,\nand to march! The virus that\nis eating up our democracy will also die\none day. In the\nmeantime, we wash our hands, wear masks,\nand post umbrellas in our windows!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Dota Szymborska, philosopher, sociologist, TEDx speaker, and AI expert, and Tomasz Kitlinski, political philosopher, activist, and curator (Open City Festival of Public Art in Lublin on Hospit-ALTER-ity) We are…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":289,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50909,18694],"tags":[42049,61850,882,61856],"class_list":["post-6142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fieldnotes","category-events-news","tag-letters-from-the-field","tag-pandemos","tag-poland","tag-resistance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/users\/289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6143,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6142\/revisions\/6143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-test.newschool.edu\/tcds\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}