Going Back to “Normal” After COVID
Everyone’s worried about all the dumbest questions about life “after” COVID.
Let’s start with the fact that there is no foreseeable “after.” COVID may become less of a problem for the vaccinated, but otherwise, it’s going to stick around. We’ll have variants…and variants of those variants. We’ll have breakthrough cases. Pfizer might as well print its shareholder certificates on US Treasury bonds.
Still, that hasn’t stopped people from asking questions like these:
How will we get used to seeing people indoors again?
For the love of god, individuals who actually bothered to stop seeing people indoors (both us — me and a close acquaintance) will adjust in, like, five minutes. Next!
When should I stop wearing a mask?
Whenever cases drop to zero or you no longer care if you get COVID. Yes, even if you’re vaccinated — breakthrough cases are rare, but they’re a thing. All this angsting over whether wearing a mask “sends the wrong message” is pointless and dumb, as I already wrote about in this brilliant essay.
Should employers require a vaccine passport to return to the office?
No, OSHA or HHS should create a uniform requirement so our society don’t subrogate one more public function to the whims of private corporations. But yes, we should require people to protect one another, because: duh. “But vaccine passports will impinge on my individual liberty…waaaaaaah!” No, they will impinge on your license to act like a massive baby who doesn’t want to be called out about not doing the right thing voluntarily.
That was fun. What else you got? How about these questions…
How am I supposed to live with so many millions of people who do not give a whit about anyone else’s welfare?
Okay, the pandemic is something like over. Great. That leaves me (and the few other people like me) to get over my disappointment and anger about living in a country with so many people who simply don’t care about anyone but themselves.
Notice I didn’t say “society.” I think we can pretty much hold a funeral for the concept that America is anything but a bunch of people living near one another. A cohesive group of people with shared values wouldn’t act like we’ve acted. They would band together. They would have ensured critical workers had protections (real protections, like awesome ventilation) from day one (and hazard pay to say “thank you” for risking your health to sell us groceries). They would have respected social distancing guidelines. They wouldn’t have turned wearing a mask into a culture war. What’s next? “Stop telling me I can’t defecate in the aisles of my local home improvement store, because that’s what Nathan Hale would have wanted!!”
No, I live in a place with millions of people who are just out for themselves. I knew this already — America has been going along with this winner-takes-all model for years now, because people just don’t want to give up hope that they will be the next Kardashian or Bhad Bhabie or Logan Paul (Paul Logan? I honestly don’t care which it is…). Whatever you do, don’t raise the taxes on capital gains, because someday, when I sign a Jay Z-type record deal, it could hit me in the pocketbook.
Pfffht.
I could kind of ignore it, though. I could argue this is a fundamentally good society.
Not anymore.
I have been repeatedly confronted with the sight of people pretending there is no problem, using the problem to puff themselves up, and prioritize their own disposable pleasure above preserving others’ safety.
Look — I know I’m going to die of something at some point. I don’t like it, but I admit it. I just don’t want it to be for a really dumb reason, and I can’t think of a dumber reason than: somebody just couldn’t not go to a restaurant for a period of time. That is what some of us have made the ultimate sacrifice for: someone else’s dinner out. Indoor dining is one of the best environments for spread: indoors with lots of people from all kinds of different backgrounds. It’s a melting pot of exhalation.
They have takeout, you know. Seriously — that’s it. Just get the food to go. Risk just went down by 99.9999999% (scientific fact).
You could fill in any other optional activity here. Yoga. The gym. Haircut. Spring break in Fort Lauderdale. That stupid Sturgis rally, cum superspreader event.
You didn’t have to do any of those things, but by virtue of this being my home, I do have to live with the knowledge that you did those things. Intentionally.
Why does anyone want the old normal back?
If we’re being honest, the old normal was pretty awful.
Case in point: the first thing to go back to normal so far has been mass shootings, which is a curiosity. Hey, mass murderers — were you respecting the lockdowns? That’s where you drew the line you wouldn’t cross? Or was it just that people were spread too far apart to shoot at once and that’s no fun?
Whatever the reason, you’re back and reaching new heights seemingly every day. As I type this, a man killed six people at a birthday party.
Yay, America.
You know — it’s the old pandemic, and just like the current one, it’s abetted by a pretty messed up understanding of the concept of “liberty.” By now, we all know what that’s codespeak for: not only can you not ask white men to help out in a real crisis, they must retain the inviolable right to exercise deadly force whenever they decide they’ve got a case of the sads. “My woman done left and took all the reasons I’ve been working for. I’m loading my AR-15 and headin’ to the mall, yeehaw.”
And then there’s just the normal pressures of everyday life. I’m not even talking work per se. I’m talking about the relentless expectation that every spare moment of our lives has to be spent being useful to the economic engine that is the actual soul of American “culture.” The self-obsession. The self-promotion. The side hustles (not the “second job to feed my kid” side hustle, but the “maybe I’ll be discovered and become famous side hustle”).
I know that when things do finally go back to normal, I’m probably going to be right there with all you wannabe famewhores, doing Instagram-worthy things (even if I don’t care how many followers I have). I’ll be rushing hither and thither on airplanes to see sights I’ve already seen countless photos of, tormented by the FOMO of not seeing and photographing it myself. I’ll be trying to work myself back into pre-pandemic shape like an Olympic athlete, minus the Olympics. I’ll be trying to get a table at whatever must-see restaurant just opened up. I’ll be working my ass off to pay for it all.
And looming in the background is an increasingly hotter and hotter world. That’s another thing I don’t want to die for: your SUV. I will not defend to the death or even minor inconvenience your right to drive a five thousand pound vehicle with an 8-cylinder HEMI that gets 12 miles to the gallon. It’s overkill, just like your 5,000 square foot home. We’re extincting species better than a hurtling comet just so people can have a spare room for their TV.
Who does any of this serve? None of us, yet all of us.
We’ve all bought into the idea that we must flog ourselves into greater and greater productivity, even though it is bringing us to untold grief. We have accepted the idea that the economy in this form and only this form is as immutable as the natural world in which we live.
It’s not, and we can imagine something a whole lot better than normal. We’re just too selfish to try.
