This from CNN:
There is no getting ‘back to normal,’ experts say. The sooner we accept that, the better
As 2020 slides into and probably infects 2021, try to take heart in one discomfiting fact: Things are most likely never going “back to normal.”
It has become a well-worn phrase our politicians, officials, experts, even family, like to lean on — an ultimate, elusive prize.
Perhaps it’s nostalgia for the world of January, a place where daily life more closely resembled our past decades. Perhaps it’s a bid to show control, to revert to a time when change was not so universally imposed upon us.
But January is long gone, and it’s not coming back. And, psychologists will tell you, that’s only bad if you can’t come to terms with it.
We are slowly learning if this year’s changes are permanent. If work — for the lucky among us — will remain from home. If we will visit the grocery store less but spend more. If we will find wearing a mask on the metro to be just part of life. If shaking hands and embracing will become less common. If most of your daily interactions will occur via video conference (rather than in person).
Yet permanently severing ties with January is not necessarily a bad thing, psychologists say. The danger comes from hankering for normalcy again, rather than getting on with working out how to deal with whatever is ahead.
That is enough of that bullshit.
I really like this Tweet from an actual Harvard epidemiologist, in response to this article on Twitter. It is spot on.
Then there is this cartoon that I have to agree with.
I have a friend who hates the phrase “new normal” I’m sure if he had his druthers, he’d feed people who say it feet first through a wood chipper, and I don’t really disagree with him.
When you read the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or you learn about the history of Stalinist Russia, you learn that everyone lived under a constant oppressive fear of the state. That anyone could disappear and be punished for any reason.
That is a central theme in 1984. A malaise that permeates every aspect of society.
COVID-19 is a virus, we understand how it transmits, but we act as though it is spread by happiness. It has become a miasma.
In the beginning, the shutdowns seemed almost arbitrary and capricious in what is selected to be closed. Now it feels almost malicious, as though anything that gives us a moment of respite from the lockdown malaise is first targeted for shutdown.
You can’t go out with friends or burry a loved one, many people can’t go to the gym or their house of worship. In some places, you can go to the big box store but items designated as non-essential, you can’t buy. But you can go to the liquor store which makes it no surprise that:
In the age of pandemic, uncertainty lingers in the air. Now, new data shows that during the COVID-19 crisis, American adults have sharply increased their consumption of alcohol, drinking on more days per month, and to greater excess. Heavy drinking among women especially has soared.
You can’t go out on a date to a bar, but you can sit at home alone and drink while paying a girl to show you her jubblies on OnlyFans with the emotional intimacy of a filthy peepshow with the added dehumanization of internet communication.
And over all of this is cast that Soviet or 1984 like paranoia that you might just get caught having fun or being outside without a mask and some informant is going to rat you out like you were less than enthusiastic about your praise for Stalin or Big Brother.
That is the “new normal.” A Soviet-like existence where fun and joy and meaningful human contact are forbidden and we all exist under a crushing sense of lonely, miserable, isolation.
The Holiday season is coming up, a time of joy and family, and already the media is chastizing us that we can’t get together with relatives and enjoy the holidays or we will bring doom and gloom and death and destruction upon our heads.
I cannot imagine living in a world where for the rest of my life, the rest of my children’s lives, where we all hide behind masks, were human interaction is treated with suspicion or is outright banned, where group fun is shut down by government order.
That is not America. That is the opening to a post-apocalyptic movie about a totalitarian government.
I refuse to accept this new normal. It is not normal. It is abnormal and goes against everything uplifting to the human soul.
It needs to end as soon a possible, and when this disease has passed, like so many have before, I agree with my buddy, anyone who tries to hold onto power and maintain this “new normal” needs to fed feet first into a woodchipper.
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