Get Back

 Let's get things back to normal.

That's what I hear people say. Good people. People with wisdom and experience. They want things to stop being the way they are: abnormal. Late last week, the global death toll from COVID-19 surpassed two million. 

Two million human beings have died in less than a year from a virus that we can only pretend to understand. Vaccines are in short supply and their distribution is proving to be every bit as mismanaged as everything else associated with this disease. Cynics among us will shout, "That sounds pretty normal to me."

But it shouldn't be. Humans have a pretty good history of coming together in times of crisis. Droughts and famine, for example, have created mass humanitarian events that have narrowed the divide between left and right, east and west. That was normal. Extraordinary but expected. 

Not so much anymore. Resources are scarce and cooperation seems limited. How we choose to deal with the pandemic defines us politically. This doesn't just seem abnormal, it seems ridiculous. During the siege on the Capitol, as members of congress were being ushered to safety, certain individuals refused masks being handed out due to the confined space in which they found themselves. Would it be "normal" for these folks to be so easily distinguished along party lines? Should their reactions to the chaos outside be linked to antisocial behavior inside?

It's not normal. Disneyland is opening, at last, not as an amusement park but as a vaccination center. That's not normal. Ninety-three percent of school-age children in the U.S. are using some form of distance learning, meaning that they are not in classrooms with their peers, socializing and connecting with teachers and friends. That's not normal. I haven't had to break up a fistfight on the playground for ten months. A relief, yes, but not normal. 

And like that fistfight thing, I'm not sure I'm anxious to go back to whatever it was that got us here. When we begin to build it back, we want to build it back better. Normal gave us climate change. Normal gave us corporations are people. Normal gave us Qanon. Normal gave us 2020. 

I'm not sure about normal, but I'm sure I don't want to go back to 2020.