English 10H 2nd semester Beginning Synthesis assignment

In the weeks and months following the events of September 11, 2001, there were understandably widespread feelings of anger and rage, along with the feeling of needing payback. They were understandable because that seems to be what human beings do—we lash out at those we perceive to be our enemies, out of fear, confusion, and hatred. At the same time, there was a tangible sense on the part of many Americans that it was a time to pause and reflect on how we got to this point, and what changes could we make as a society to try and see that something like this never happened again. There was a brief feeling that maybe a window was opening for us to reexamine our role and place in the world. Sadly, those feelings didn’t last long, and that window was slammed shut by the forces of normalization, the voices telling us to “get back to business.” In fact, the president at the time encouraged people to “go shopping,” and to “get down to DisneyWorld.”

This is the background for this assignment—the last time something so widespread and dramatic affected all Americans was probably 9/11, and that’s the context for what this asks you to do.

Prompt: Having lived through the last 10+ months of the pandemic, and the disruptions to our ordinary daily lives, and now, with vaccines becoming more widely available, and the plan to return to school, what do you think is possible in the post-pandemic world? On the day before schools shut down, March 16, 2020, Elizabeth Carter asked this question: “What do you think normal will look like on the other side of this?” Your job is to come up with an answer to that question, using your own experience and the 2 articles you read last week (“Coronavirus in 2021 and Beyond: When Will Life Return to Normal?” and “When will 2021 feel normal again? Here’s what eight experts predict”). This is the first exercise in synthesizing information; incorporate ideas from both articles along with your own thinking.

Feel free to include any thoughts you have about what you’ve seen, what you’ve felt, what you’ve experienced, balanced with a few thoughts you read and incorporate. Think about the conversations we’ve had this year about culture, about justice, about the intersection of the pandemic with the protests for racial justice, and about thinking critically about our lives and how to make them better.