We don’t have much time, so we’ll make our remarks brief.
The world turns apocalyptically in 2020. In the United States, division hasn’t approached this fever pitch since the Civil War, with a census and monumentally crucial elections combining to make this the most consequential year of our lives. A president has been impeached for the third time in U.S. history, nuclear war with North Korea looms large in addition to mounting casualties from the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the effects of global warming are manifest in record-breaking temperatures, drought, and weather “events,” the rain forests are blazing and being razed.
The state of planet Earth is in dire straits, homelessness is rising, empathy is being obliterated, war and aggression and tribal nationalism and factionalism and disintegration has taken hold of the globe. Cruelty and confusion have replaced civility and consensus-building as the de facto mode of governance in a Trumpian dystopia verging on destruction. In fact, cruelty is the point (Serwer, 2018) for a president who sows hatred and acrimony like a smokestack on full blast. The “wealthy” elites continue to win (Giridharadas, 2018) despite the promises of a “meritocratic” system (Markovits, 2019).
Donald J. Trump is a criminal operating above the laws and constitution in an authoritarian police-state of his making, and his damage to common understanding and decency has been immense. Since 2016, truth itself has been on trial, and it has been losing ground to the louder screams of disinformation and fear-mongering echoing off the silos. However,…
This is not an elegy. 2020 is (and will be) seen as an epoch-defining year. Critical Storytelling in 2020: Elections and Beyond is an anthology of autoethnographies, poetry, research, and critical stories told by undergraduate and graduate students (and faculty) across disciplines. The storytellers and scholars in this volume face issues that are of vital importance in this unprecedented election year: social, racial, and class inequity; mass incarceration and its effects on families in the black community, sexual assault, media representations of minorities, privacy concerns in a world of social media, college admissions, anxiety and depression, narcissism in the Millennial generation, LGBTQ rights, and more.
The novel coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has also emerged, wreaking havoc in its deadly and destructive spread while sparing no nation. While none of the chapters in this volume deal with the coronavirus, they do deal with subjects likely to be impacted by the virus that will demand our attention as the crisis wanes. The topics in this volume elucidate lived experiences and critical research, social problems and stories, that give as much reason for close reading as before the pandemic struck.
Hindsight is 20/20, but critical storytelling looks backward and forward. We don’t have much time. What we do this year and beyond will matter more than we know. Henry David Thoreau (1995) said that the “nick” of time is that point that is sandwiched in between the past eternity and the present eternity. Issues and elections stand in our future eternity, and our past eternity stands just that: in our past. 2020 is our nick of time.