Portals aren't always a matter of choice, or even of noticing you've crossed one. In "The Pandemic is a Portal," Arundhati Roy argues that COVID-19 forced a rupture that halted global capitalism, exposed the fragility of the world's most powerful nations, and stripped away the illusion of "normal" life as something stable or inevitable. She refuses nostalgia for what came before, insisting the crisis is not an interruption to survive but a gateway — one we can drag our old prejudices, greed, and dead ideas through, or one we can walk through "lightly, with little luggage," ready to imagine something else entirely. Join us in sitting with a portal none of us asked to walk through and can't walk back out of. What have you been dragging through the door with you that you could set down instead?

Text: Arundhati Roy’s “The Pandemic is a Portal”

Date: Sunday, August 30 at 2pm 

Location: Lakewood Park, Cleveland, OH with Aditi & Rob

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