Performing my My Pandemic Impact Statement (PISS in short): Answering Inhumane Invitation

Abstract

The “challenges” during COVID-19 led administrators to “invite” employees to write Pandemic Impact Statements. I perform my PISS, pointing to invisible traumas, hidden vulnerabilities, and concluding with taken-for-granted privileges. Starting in various times and places, private and collective, I position myself in relation to pandemics, rituals, and (lack of) order. As ‘stay-at-home’ orders were issued, I air the compulsive repetition of the intergenerational Trauma of previous lockdowns. The 2020 iteration of a starting point explores the loneliness pandemics bring. I run through this loneliness and the mental triggers, anger, and depression, COVID pushes. Like everyone, administrators do the bare minimum during COVID; However, “inviting” faculty to write statements lacks compassion since it forces extra labor in sharing our pain while sanitizing it. Being tenured allows me to write a Pandemic Impact Suffering Statement with emotions, traumas, suffering, and demand administrators’ owning these elements instead of reveling in faculty texts of suffering.

Keywords

Covid-19, Traumas, Academia Management, Emotions, Privilige

Performing my Pandemic Impact Statement (PISS in short): Answering Inhumane Invitation

gonen@comm.umass.edu

“Beginning in the Spring 2020 semester, faculty across the University experienced a significant disruption due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. As a result of the health crisis, all faculty moved their courses online, research facilities including labs and libraries were closed and all student evaluation of teaching was suspended. In conjunction with the disruptions experienced on-campus, many faculty were working out of their homes while simultaneously providing childcare due to closures of daycare facilities and K-12 schooling. Research disruptions, shifts in teaching modalities, limited childcare, and remote work persisted into Summer 2020. As such, we invite you to include a Pandemic Impact Statement with your AFR describing the adjustments you have made, how your work in particular has been impacted by the health crisis, and your contributions to the University’s transition to remote work.”

It is impolite to reject such a gracious invitation, although that what I was thinking of doing initially. As Couper-Kuhlen found (2014), invitations prefer agreement as their responses (unlike suggestions, for example.) I am working on a paper discussing the family of actions of invitations, suggestions, demands, and sacrifices, following Couper-Kuhlen’s paper (Author, in prep). Hence, and therefore, on a second, third, fourth, or fifth thought, here is my “Pandemic Impact Statement” (PISS for short). It might be responding more to the sentences before the invitation than to the limiting clauses after it, but I think being a “Statement” affords the freedom to respond to the invitation as I wish.

Resisting an inhumane invitation: Making my PISS

My pandemic statement should start 03/02 when I voted in my country of origin elections, happening at some very beginning of the Pandemic, bid my parents farewell (maybe for the last time, soundtrack: Nick Cave and The Bad Seed/ The weeping song), boarded with my partner, my six yo daughter and 3.5-months-old son an airplane, landed in my country of residence where there was no sign of a raging pandemic, brought my kid to school (it had been opened back then), and voted again.

My pandemic statement must start, as all telling of Trauma of people of my kind, at the Second World War.

My pandemic statement starts on 04/16, 197X. It is the special night of the year that people of my kind celebrated the Seder, literally The Order. The telling of the Exodus. During this event, a text known as the Hagaddah, “the telling,” is read. I used this text in a recent sole-authorship publication (Author, in-press a). However, back then, I just participated. Stories say I was staring with eyes wide open, trying to grasp as much as I can from the event, although I was 60 hours old. In this event, we celebrated 3-4 pandemics. As we recall the ten plagues that God threw on Egypt, we recall the first one was Blood, when The Nile turned into Blood instead of water. The “Plague” is the fifth plague (in Hebrew, there is a distinction: the “Plagues” are maka (makot in plural), and the fifth one is dever), known for its bubonic and pneumonic types as the famous pandemics, whose symptoms resemble COVID-19. This plague is so famous that Camus used it in his famous book (2012/originally 1947, we read it in highschool). The sixths one is a plague of skin diseases. We celebrate these pandemics every year in this ritual of order. The Exodus resulted from these pandemics, so a Pandemic can be seen as a good thing; they can lead to freedom. We celebrate them; otherwise, why would we celebrate them every year, even from before the time I was two days old.

However, freedom has a different meaning, which was also relevant in the Exodus. Freedom is also the breakdown of all social order and social structures. Pandemics also lead to that. Little remembered fact about the Exodus: only two persons who exited Egypt made it to the Promise Land; the rest perished in the desert. Moses spent 40 years in the desert trying to build a new social order, which included believing in just one God, creating a new justice system, and feeding a new nation that was created then and there. Unlike my mother’s attempt to maintain order at all costs, including hosting a Seder for 15 or so people (I never asked how many people were there at that Seder) 60 hours after giving birth, the social order and social structures can break down, mostly when a Pandemic happens. Furthermore, for people of my kind, when the social order breaks down, when social structures break down, due to pandemics (but not only), the world stops being safe (if it ever was). Hence, many massacres of people of my kind happened following pandemics, hence the known belief that people of my kind spread diseases, partially due to their high sickness ratios during pandemics, as happens during Covid-19. From the age of 2-days old, I have been having strange relations with Pandemics, Order, Organizations, and the impact of it all.

List of lockdowns, Shelter in place, Stay-at-Home order, or advisory,

My paper about the long list also mentions that the Hagaddah, the telling, mainly consists of lists. So, we can talk about lists. The lists of names for the situation the Pandemic created: In California, it was called “Shelter in Place,” In New York state it was called “stay at home order,” in our great commonwealth, it was either “stay at home advisory” or “safer at home advisory,” in my country of origin it is Seger, translatable to closure or lockdown. My partner usually says that we are in ‘lockdown.’ I usually resist this terminology. After all, unlike my country of origin, where they were not allowed to leave their house or to move or visit other towns, I was able to run two towns outside my home. This is no lockdown. Lockdowns or Shelter in place have very different meanings in my life.

The first one was when I was roughly my son’s age when the Pandemic started. Slightly older. The last war that my country of origin won and lost. I do not remember much from that lockdown, other than my brother’s stories about my mom carrying me to the shelter when alarms went off. I assume my son will not remember much, other than the stories we tell him, and maybe this statement from the Pandemic. Not remembering does not mean there was no impact, as some psychologists may tell us.

Fast forward a few years, and again we have sheltered in place. This time not in a shelter, but a secured sealed room in the house, due to lack of enough shelters and fear of chemical warfare. I do not remember much from this lockdown. I remember driving to bring my grandfather to live with us when the lockdown was about to start, all the roads were empty, and I was a minted new driver. He lived with us throughout that war. I remember a few alarms at a few nights, some getting wet in the rain, after too many alarms and too little sleep, some missile hanging in the ceiling of a mall, not far away from the ammonium nitrate facilities in the port of my home town. I was a teenager at the time, and still, I do not remember much from the First US Gulf war, other than my country of origin being bombarded now and again. No chemical warfare was used. Not remembering much does not mean there was no impact, as some psychologists may tell us.

Fast forward another decade and a half or so. This time, I do remember. It was probably the war that drove me out of my country of origin. The similarities to the Pandemic are apparent: both then and now, the administration does not care about the citizens of its country, in both I had to work too much, in both my working conditions were severely harmed due to the outside circumstances with little accommodations from those who could accommodate them, in both I clung to normalcy as much as I could, in both my clinging drove my partner mad. I remember meeting the mediators as we were negotiating a new contract for the union I chaired. We met them most of the time 100 Kilometers from where we lived because my hometown was bombarded regularly. Our first meeting, we drove by the county court and saw the damages of the missile, which had hit it, although we were just there defending our right to strike. Even when missiles were flying on daily bases, I kept my everyday life. I went to the beach, to the chagrin of the then non-official and future partner. I needed normal. For me, breaking of normal is dangerous. I cannot function when the world collapse. Order must be maintained; as my discipline argues, there is “order in all points” (Sacks quoted in Jefferson 1984) because there is an imminent threat when there is no order, and even when there is a real imminent threat in the form of missiles flying around, I prefer believing the regular order exists than to believe it is breaking down.

I will skip the many times I was forced to take Shelter due to some missiles flying around when I was teaching in a frontier college in my country of origin. Suffice to recall the one time on the first day of one semester there, when a student got killed, and my good friend has just started teaching that day because I told him I would be teaching that day (although eventually, I did not); I do not feel that great about it.

When my daughter was my son’s current age or so, we visited my country of origin. We did what is customary, having a celebration to present the first newborn in our family. During the event, an alarm sounded, as a missile made its way from the same frontier of the college I was teaching in a few years earlier to the heart of the country. We were forced to shelter in place. The elderly guests were escorted to the basement of the venue where the celebration took place. The other guests, self-included, ran to the closest public Shelter some 30 meters away. On our way, we saw two missiles kissing at the clear blue sky above us. If it were not for missiles colliding, this could have been a pastoral photo (someone indeed took a photo of that kissing). I hope that my daughter does not remember much from this event, other than the stories, maybe the photo, and this statement.

This boring long list brings out a strange similarity. I was taken to shelter when I was less than one year old. My daughter has suffered the same. My son the same. Is this Freud’s “repetition compulsion” that Burke’s (1963, the text I start my Undergraduate intro to comm with and read it in all my grad courses) saw as the part of the rotten perfection of humanity? One, of course, needs to ask what the shelters my parents, when they were less than one yo, had taken. The sensitive reader remembers where this statement must start.

This boring list of lockdowns, taking Shelter, stay-at-home ‘advisories’ also tells you that the staying at home due to an imminent risk to my life and my family members’ life, is nothing new. The impact of a recurring trauma (soundtrack: Hadag Nahash: Little man for some other untold possible traumas) is probably weaker than a fresh new one. There is a pattern of behavior, known to the person in threat; flight is one of them, fight is another. Knowing that administration does not care about its underlings at times of danger is nothing new. I must admit my fury over it this time is nothing like the fury I experienced last time. Hopefully, my conclusions from this apathy will be different, or, as my partner declares, we should be thinking of moving.

The boring long list also suggests that the Hagadah as a text seems to be correct. Every generation, as we say in the ritual, there is something that tries to kill us. Luckily, we will all die at the end (and hopefully not in the desert).

The Zeider of 2020

By the end of March, it was evident that our usual Seder (Seider in American English) cannot happen. After years of suffering family’s Seders, once we exited our country of origin, we started hosting our Seider with friends, making this event somewhat tolerable, almost enjoyable, and memorable, mostly for our guests, compensation for past suffering. No hosting could have happened in 2020, including Seiders. We changed our plans and decided to do a zoom seider with a couple of families we know in the region. I was not happy with this plan, since we did not know the families that well, and I was afraid of a re-traumatizing of all the past Seders.

My country of origin was in lockdown. They were not allowed to get 500 feet from their homes. Hence, no Seders could occur there (other than for the President and the Prime minister, who ignored the lockdown). Hence everyone was doing Seder in Zoom, and everyone means everyone. So the families we planned of doing our Seider with decided to join their Family’s Zoom Seder. Joining our families was not an option for us. Enough Trauma around Seders made it clear that my family will be exceptional again and will not hold a Zoom seder, and my partner’s family, for us, holding a Seder with them on Zoom at 11 am, was one Trauma too many.

The Seider is a family event that should not be celebrated alone. And here we were, about to have the Seider alone. My son’s first Seider was about to be a traumatic event, like mine. My daughter’s Seider, an annual festive event, would be sitting with her parents and her brother, alone, going through the motions of the ritual, which celebrates pandemics but mainly freedom, at a time when we barely have the freedom to leave our house. But then it hits me, and we can have a zoom seider with people we like. The night before, I discussed it with my partner, and in the morning of the event, we invited everyone we hosted in the last ten years to join us in the Zeider:

“Hi there!

tl;dr: You’re invited to drop in, for any length of time*, anytime between 6-8pm TODAY, April 8th, for our Zoom Seider- just CLICK HERE.

Hope you are staying safe in these strange times.

You are receiving this non-invite invite because at some point between 2011 and 2019, we invited you to our Passover Seider, either first or second (kiddie version), either in La Jolla** or, more likely, in Granby.***

Either you did, or did not, join us in this wonderfully horrible (or horribly wonderful) ritual of suffering.

This year, for obvious reasons, we will not invite you (or anyone, really) to our Seider.

But we won’t stop there. We will take it a step further. We will not invite to the Zeider, a portmanteau of Zoom and Seider, as we call it (“we” means no one in this case).

So if you happen to be online between 6-8pm EDT****, you can just drop in to say hi, you know, zoom bombing or boom zombing (zombie-ing?) or boom zooming to Ziedering looming.

Here is the link to our Zoom: https://us04web.zoom.us/j/4145323958

Keep in mind that every 40 minutes we will break for a breather and will be right back at the same link. Because Zoom is here for us in this crisis, but not quite so much here for us that they will waive their costs, and we are far too cheap to pay for Zoom Pro for just one event.

And like the Exodus, this is all last minute, with no preparation although we had plenty of time to prepare, so you do not need to tell us if you can or cannot make it. Surprise us if you are up to it. It’ll brighten up our weird holiday.

We’ll have enough food for virtually all of you!

Happy holidays to those celebrating Passover or Easter or Pink Moon.

Stay sa(fe|ne) & healthy,

Footnotes:

* Minimum length of time = 1min = hello+goodbye, but please do not feel obligated to do even that.

** The one and only, the mythical Seider, the genesis that led to all the others. Echad La Jollay’nu.

*** Probability analysis for the nerds in the audience: the longer ago this happened, the higher probability of (a) your email address bouncing and thus you never receiving this email, and/or (b) you being surprised by this invite. In contrast, the probability of (c) us being surprised that you came up in our data is influenced far more by (1) whether or not you actually attended, (2) how many photos were snapped that year, and (3) how young Gavahn was at the time, i.e. how sleepless we were that year.

**** That’s 3-5pm PDT for you lazy west coast people who can’t be bothered to convert timezones.*****”

We signed and sent.

At the Zeider, Natasha Shrikant, an Alum Ph.D. of our program (2017?), Sunny Lee, An Alum Ph.D. of our program (2013?), and Prof. Alena Vaselyeva joined us. They happened to stagger their sharing their time with us, so throughout the Zeider, we had at least another person celebrating it with us. My daughter knows Alena, from department holiday and our Super Bowl parties, so she recognized some familiar face. We also had an Israeli who used to be a post-doc at Umass joining us. Another graduate student apologized she did not know what day it was, due to the Pandemic, so she planned to join us a day too late. That reason made perfect sense, especially since she, like us, have a young child at home. So the original Trauma of the Seder was slightly averted due to the good people who joined us, most of whom, to my surprise and delight, I knew from my department. In dark times of a pandemic, that was a small victory. Averting a trauma was the best we could achieve.

Running out of Options

“Moving where?” I ask my partner when the notion that we need to move is brought up. Going back to the country of origin is not a possibility. A fantasy it is, a possibility it is not. Right now, most countries in the world will not accept us (oh the irony of this sentence and when this statement must start!). Maybe Germany. However, it seems we are running out of options.

Because when the Pandemic started, I had two options. Either fury or anger (my paper abovementioned start with analyzing a list that contains both Anger and Fury), for the sheer stupidity of it all, or depression, quietly resigning to my inner world (soundtrack: Counting Crows: Perfect Blue Building). The anger from the empty rhetoric, lack of planning, vision, understanding of possibilities, bad administrators, and lack of empathy. I still do not understand the possibility of a second wave: there were eight months to prepare for a second wave, there should not be any second wave: turn hotels into hospitals, turn non-essential doctors into COVID doctors, produce the needed medical equipment, all these steps are not complicated. A few of these have happened. So many reasons to get upset, angry, and frustrated about, but so few outlets that indeed this cannot be the healthy option. Hence, depression seems like a better option. No outburst, calm, and composure. Some side effects of not wanting to get out of bed, but there are remedies for that.

By mid-march, I returned to running. Physical activity is very good for fighting all kinds of mental instabilities, as I preach to my graduate students in the first meeting of any course I teach. I stopped running due to my bad back a few months earlier. Thus, I started again. 10k three times a week. At night, between 9 and 11 pm, when the children are sleeping. At the first run, one of the first songs that come in in my headphones was “The PR of Death” by an Israeli song-writer/singer, a fitting song for this time, about how from being considered evil, so much so that it is taken as a punishment, Death changes its PR and is considered good and gives freedom. Running at night gives some pleasure of meeting nocturnal animals, like foxes, dead squirrels, and raccoons, and once I saw a couple of deer crossing my road. Indeed, majestic animals!

Running also allows me to eat ice cream. But 10K is not enough. The running increased as the corona increased, 12k, 14k, 16k. And with it, the amount of ice cream eaten. I was fortunate not to be in my country of origin, where such running would not be possible. Running, unlike walking, does not allow one to think. While walking, I can think of all the stupidity around COVID, all levels of administration present. From schools to university, to states, to countries. No administrator seems to know how to respond to a pandemic humanely. Alternatively, I can think of texts for all kinds of statements like this PISS. Luckily, this pondering does not happen when running, only the music (for this PISS) and little thoughts are running in my ears. The body gets control over the mind; the Pandemic fades away ever so slightly. I am almost in control. The order is maintained before getting back home to sleep. And then waking up to another day of Pandemic, if not to a crying child at the wee hours.

Will somebody please think of the children

By March, it was clear we were all alone in it,[1] with two kids at home, one 6.5 years old, the other started as four-months-old and is by now 11-months-old, living most of his life during the pandemic (soundtrack here: Talking Heads/Life during wartime). We hope by the time he is four, this will no longer be the case. No schools. No babysitters. No cleaners. No friends. No colleagues. No one to see. Nowhere to go. Nothing. And we needed to take care of the children. Our daughter, luckily, had a neighbor friend. So they spent the time together. My newborn started sleeping the night in mid-April. Things were looking up.

The MA admin used the ‘salami’ system. First, they closed the schools for just two weeks. We can handle two weeks! Then, since we were able to handle two weeks, they closed for four more weeks. We can handle four more weeks. Every time the closer was prolonged, my mood dropped another ton. By May, only delusional people, like myself, did not see the pattern, but then it was made clear. Schools will not open this year. And my energies continue to shrink.

But there was a silver lining because daycares might open. Then, the guidelines for daycares were published. My partner became deeply distraught from them. Prisons for two-years-old. That was basically it. They can open, as such, by the end of June. Three months with no child care, with seeing no one, with no help, no baby sitters. So prison for babies it is, we will take it! If this is what we need to survive, so be it. We signed up for the daycare before he was born. We were promised five days a week as of May. In November, we were promised that. By May, things were still closed. By June, the reopening was on the horizon. But our provider declared she could not do such a prison. So we waited. The guidelines, idiotic and inhumane as all administrations’ guidelines, softened somewhat. The daycare provider agreed to open by the end of July. Alas, she had no room for our boy, due to the closers of all preschools, she kept the older kids, who were supposed to move up in life. My partner almost broke down over the phone with her. So she found three days for our boy. And a couple of days for our Seven years old. She was so eager for a human company that she enjoys every day she goes there, to build comradery with three-year-olds. Because that is the company, we finally had. Our 11-month-old is the most social member of our household at the moment!

The story about the school of the 7-year-old is much too painful to share. Enough to say that as I write this PISS, it is unclear which school she will go to. Since she went to some public school, and since all public education in Massachusetts is poorly managed during this Pandemic, we consider everything. But this struggle will probably go to next years’ PISS. It will be an ongoing series. No one thinks of the children, or students, or workers, or people, in the public education systems in MA right now. Everything is kept to local administrators who might do their best but without clear guidance and with stresses that break even the best of people. And most of them are broken. Nevertheless, I try to shelter my children from this breakdown, and as I do not remember much from my childhood lockdowns, I hope they will have little scars from this Pandemic.

Fast forward another decade and a half or so. This time, I do remember. It was probably the war that drove me out of my country of origin. The similarities to the Pandemic are apparent: both then and now, the administration does not care about the citizens of its country, in both I had to work too much, in both my working conditions were severely harmed due to the outside circumstances with little accommodations from those who could accommodate them, in both I clung to normalcy as much as I could, in both my clinging drove my partner mad. I remember meeting the mediators as we were negotiating a new contract for the union I chaired. We met them most of the time 100 Kilometers from where we lived because my hometown was bombarded regularly. Our first meeting, we drove by the county court and saw the damages of the missile, which had hit it, although we were just there defending our right to strike. Even when missiles were flying on daily bases, I kept my normal life. I went to the beach, to the chagrin of the then non-official and future partner. I needed normal. For me, breaking of normal is dangerous. I cannot function when the world collapse. Order must be maintained, as my discipline argues, there is “order in all point” (Sacks quoted in Jefferson 1984) because there is an imminent threat when there is no order, and even when there is a real imminent threat in the form of missiles flying around, I prefer believing the normal order exists than to believe it is breaking down.

If you skipped to this line because you realized the previous paragraph repeated itself, Congrats! You are a good reader. But then, why did I repeat this paragraph? And why did I repeat myself at all? Is it to a tribute to Gertrude Stein who said, “Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realising everything and every one comes out of them in repeating.” (quoted in Becker, 1988:19 the first reading of comm118). If you did not notice you read the same paragraph twice, there is little I can write that will make sense. I will not answer why this paragraph twice. I think it is obvious. But the repetition itself has a point. The prolonging of this text has another goal. In another paper (Dori-Hacohen, 2017), I argue that language use in interaction is iconic of social relations, the further the participants’ utterances are from one another, the further the participants are from each other. Icons are signs in which the sign resembles its referent. This PISS is iconic of the suffering, too long, seems to be never-ending, with many repetitions, a sense of aimlessness, much like life during COVID-19. Of course, similar to the map that Borges (1988) wrote about its remnants were found once, no statement can deliver the entire experience of the impact of COVID. But it is also iconic of the relations between me, the writer, and the “invite”-or of this text. The longer my PISS, the further I am from you since you need this text to relate to me, where, in all honesty, no such text should be written for people to relate to one another during a pandemic. However, such empathy requires more than the bare minimum, and you, like me, like everyone, cannot give more than the bare minimum.

The Bare minimum

So I ran, and I run. Running is a flight response. I think running is the only thing I do more than enough. I run fast (about 5 minutes per kilometer), and I ran a lot, two elements showing it is more than enough. More than the bare minimum. Because every other activity cannot be done at any higher level than the bare minimum. When an administrator asked me to do more than the bare minimum, I responded with anger. Since they were not allowed to ask me to do that little more. The breakfast, lunch, and dinner all are executed at the minimal level, to have food that my kids will eat. Luckily, my newborn eats everything, so this is not much work. Work? No more than the bare minimum. If I promised to write a paper, I would write it, with little literature review added to what I know. I was planning to write the paper from scratch when I found out, surprisingly, that I had written some elements of it for some unpublished conference. I completely forgot that I wrote that unpublished paper or that I attended the conference. That segment was also revised as a chapter for the book I am writing. I have not written a single page for it since the Pandemic started. I barely remember conferences or texts before the Pandemic. Nevertheless, I was able to piece that paper together. So another bare minimum paper was written, submitted, revised, and accepted for publication during the Pandemic (Dori-Hacohen, in-press b). When another paper demanded revisions, my co-authors (my then three advisees, Reijven, Cho, Ross, and Dori-Hacohen, in-press) did the revisions. I barely touched the revisions. So much so that when I read the revised-almost submitted paper, I could not recognize our original argument in it. My advisees learned that you do not need to appease the reviewers; I learned that less than the bare minimum could ruin a paper.

By June, the level of care we gave our children reached the ‘bare minimum level,’ as our neighbor put it: “if they are alive, we did our job!” This level will remain throughout the Pandemic, as all public education systems in MA seem to care more about finances, business, public image, risks, and health than education. It seems administrators are also doing the bare minimum, seeking revenue and places to cut budgets, ignoring all other factors. I can relate to that. We are all doing our bare minimum, so why should you be any different?

First and last response to this invite: on language games

By now, you understand somewhat better the impact of the Pandemic on me; after all, you invited me to write this Pandemic Impact Statement (PISS). But you probably do not know the half of it (it is an expression; you do not know 1 of 100 of it, like how exhaustion settles in at 4 pm in good days, at 1 pm on other days, or like the dialogue over dinner table: my partner: “Oh, it has been such a long day.” Me: “you say this thing every day!”).

When I first saw the invitation to write my PISS, I thought, why, why should I? Surely, the English professor will write it better than I can. “About suffering, they were never wrong, the old Masters,” as Auden once wrote. I figured this because when asked for a ‘statement,’ I read a statement as this heavy, important document that is supposed to be meaningful. I did not understand it is a short, bullet-point list of ‘accomplishments’ and ‘constraints,’ as I was told the ‘statement’ should be at the ‘advance’ workshop. A “short, bullet-point list” is not a statement. A long list cannot pass as a statement. I did not realize the PISS is supposed to be the empty bureaucratic tool that it is. The language game of ‘statement’ precludes a list of bullet points. It is probably a good time to share my first response to the email that ‘invited’ us to write this PISS:

It is still my response. To ask people who suffer to waste the time they do not have to write statements about their suffering increases suffering in the world. This is what this invitation achieves, and nothing more. It is unreasonable and unclear: do administrators need to read such a statement to understand the suffering of their workers? Can’t they find the empathy to relate to their workers without such statements? Have they lost all their humanity, to not being able to identify with others, without making them write about it? (In the instructions to transfer our courses to online, we were encouraged to show our humanity in the video we record. I found that language strange.) Can’t we write a statement when there is a personal action, instead of re-living these times for the sheer enjoyment of you, the reader? Or do administrators need documentation of the suffering for some accountability from above? Which probably makes it even worse. Maybe it is for a wellness reason: to allow people to air their suffering, which may be the first step toward healing. Indeed, this must be the reason for the invitation to write my PISS. This is the reason. It cannot be the will to read snuff-like texts. We invite the weakest among us to write statements to show how responsive we are to their weakness. How gracious we are at allowing them to present their weakness. God forbid we help them (e.g., creating a ‘fact-sheet of Pandemic disruption’ for specific members by writing all the available information about their suffering, information that is easily accessible to you, the administrators, via changes to teaching, requests for childcare/adult-care funds, report of course transformation, and others bureaucratic documents you force us to write to get ‘favors’ that can help us do our work). We will make them write. So we can glee we are not them.

If there is one thing administrators need, it is for their time to be wasted, so they cannot develop other ‘benevolent’ ideas like this PISS. I did my best to achieve just that. To waste time by writing a lengthy statement, which who knows how much of it is accurate, and which has little to do with the prompt of “describing the adjustments you have made, how the health crisis has impacted your work in particular, and your contributions to the University’s transition to remote work.” Because, let us face it, since this invitation did not care about me as a human, I should not care about this invitation, its goals, and its authors.

Lastly, one can think of resilience as using creativity to overcome challenges or resist oppression (Metzl, 2009, Hartley, 2007). I believe this PISS shows my resilience. This PISS did not follow the instruction given to faculty in the “ADVANCE” workshop: it is not short, it is not bullet points, it does not stress accomplishments, nor constraints due to COVID-19, it seems to be lacking judiciousness. Alas, I am lucky, some would say privileged, an associate professor with tenure in a nice department, nice income, nice house, nice partner, good kids. From this privileged position, I can write an almost honest PISS. I can write what the weak people, who ‘benefit’ from these PISS, cannot. The “ADVANCE” workshop, in the true spirit of management, wanted us to make sure no feelings, emotions, pain, or suffering get into the Pandemic Impact Statement, which eliminates the point of such statement. In this statement, I did not give much of the pain caused by the Pandemic, I showed some emotions (anger) and hinted to some feelings and some of the suffering. Because if we are to advance the weakest among us, we must allow feelings, emotions, pain, and suffering (long list!) to be part of academic life, review, and promotion processes. Hence, this was my Pandemic Impact Suffering Statement (PISS in short) to allow some of the basic elements of the Pandemic to get into the discussion in a non-neutered manner (soundtrack Lauren Hill: Forgive them Fathe r).

Thank you for this invitation, keep sa(ne+fe).

Sited work

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Burke, K. (1963). Definition of man. The Hudson Review, 16(4), 491-514.

Camus, A. (2012). The plague. Vintage.

Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2014). What does grammar tell us about action?. Pragmatics, 24(3), 623-647

Dori-Hacohen, G. (2017). Creative Resonance and Misalignment Stance: Achieving Distance in One Hebrew Interaction. Functions of Language, 24(1), 16-40.

Dori-Hacohen, G. (in-press b) From Participating to Derogatory: The “Arab” voice and its absence in two areas of the Israeli Public Sphere. Israel studies in language and society.

Dori-Hacohen, G. (in-press a). The “Long List” in Oral Interactions: Definition, examples, context, and some of its achievements. Pragmatics. https://benjamins.com/catalog/prag.19007.dor

Dori-Hacohen, G. and Nir, B. (in preparation). Directive-Commisive actions and their action and interaction elements.

Hartley, N. (2007). Resilience and creativity. In Monroe, B., & Oliviere, D. (Eds.) Resilience in palliative care: achievement in adversity. Oxford University Press, 281-292.

Jefferson Gail (1984). “Notes on a Systematic Deployment of the Acknowledgement Tokens’ Yeah’ and ‘Mm hm’.” Papers in Linguistics, 17(2), 197-216.

Metzl, E. S. (2009). The role of creative thinking in resilience after hurricane Katrina. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3(2), 112–123.

Reijven, Menno H. Cho, Sarah, Ross, Mathew & Dori-Hacohen, G. (in-press). Conspiracy, Religion, and the Public Sphere: The Discourses of Far-Right Counterpublics in the US and South Korea. International Journal of Communication.

Performing my My Pandemic Impact Statement (PISS in short): Answering Inhumane Invitation