No Going Back to Normal

I’m reading a collection of essays called The New Possible in which the authors discuss their visions of what the future should look like and how we can get there. It was published at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, and the first piece, by Jeremy Lent, talks about the kind of balanced civilization we need to develop.

Early in the piece, he asks:

Does it seem like, as soon as one crisis passes, another one rears its head before you can even settle back to some semblance of normal?

And then, discussing not just Covid but the Black Lives Matter protests from 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, he points out:

Ultimately, there is no going back to normal because normal no longer exists.

It’s an argument based on the deep flaws in neoliberalism. I don’t disagree with either his thesis or his goals, but I think I’d put the bit about normal differently:

We shouldn’t go back to normal because normal sucked.

Now these days, what with the Stupid Coup (a term Rebecca Solnit came up with that fits my perception of things), many of us, including me, would take the old normal. After all, they’re destroying parts of the government that worked well – like the Weather Service and NOAA – and making those that needed some changes, such as the understaffed Social Security offices and Veteran’s care, worse.

That’s not the mention the blatant racism of the “anti DEI” campaign, one that wants to eliminate Jackie Robinson and Harriet Tubman from our history. (It was disgusting that the baseball team that brought Robinson into the majors went to the White House despite the grifter’s efforts to erase him.)

All the flaws that exist in what passed for normal are still there and being made worse – bombing and union busting and mistreatment of immigrants – while people who shouldn’t be in charge are destroying the good stuff.

A couple of months of this and most of us – me included – would really love a return to normal. Except, like I said, normal sucked.

Take the pandemic. It’s five years in now and I’m still wearing a mask when I go into crowded public places. I don’t like wearing a mask anymore than anyone else does, but despite the fact that it is well-known that Covid and many other viruses are airborne and that in poorly ventilated spaces we are all breathing each other’s lung exhalations, and also that we have some very good tools that can substantially fix that problem, poor ventilation is still the norm.

“Normal” – once we got vaccines and fewer people died from Covid – pretended the pandemic was over even as people continued to die and get Long Covid and be sick all the time.

A new and better normal would have bolstered a public health system and put a lot of money into healthy indoor air. People wouldn’t get sick as often and miss work and school (or go to those places and make others sick).

That’s what I wanted to see happen. Instead, here I am, on my own, trying to avoid spreading illness or getting sick, not because I’m dangerously at risk (I’m old and have had some bad bouts of respiratory illness in the past, but I’m not immunocompromised), but because I don’t like getting sick and what I learned from the pandemic is that we don’t have to get sick all the time.

And of course, instead of what we need we get the ludicrous policies of the embarrassment to the Kennedy family that will make the next pandemic even worse.

Normal sucked. The stupid coup sucks worse, but normal still sucked. We don’t want normal.

Now I suspect President Biden won in 2020 because he did exude normal. But he shouldn’t have given us so much of the status quo.

In a couple of places, he didn’t. The antitrust enforcement was fabulous and he put needed money in a lot of places in the country. And our economy weathered the last few years much better than that in other countries, at least by traditional measures.

But he didn’t rock the boat as much as he could have, or should have, because one of the reasons we have the grifter back in the White House is that the normal we had, even with improvements, sucked.

The cost of housing, education, and child care are way out of proportion to what most people can afford to pay. And while by traditional economic measures the U.S. did way better after the pandemic than most countries, an awful lot of people are still stuck in financial and job hell.

Private equity has bought up so many businesses – from nursing homes to newspapers to rental property – and sucked everything out of them. Even nurses – who are desperately needed everywhere – have been forced into automated gig work systems where they get hours like Uber drivers get passengers.

And the broligarchs running tech are hoping that their so-called “AI” will replace expensive programmers. We get crappier and crappier digital products and the DOGE (dodgy) minions who don’t know how to work with the established systems that run our government, but are convinced they can break them and do better.

Yeah, right.

We have to find ways to stop the stupid coup, but we also need to focus on building a new system, one that doesn’t leave so many people out in the cold.

We want pieces of normal, like the National Weather Service and Air Traffic Control, but we also want not just Social Security, but Social Security that has enough employees and good systems so that everyone gets what they need promptly.

And while we’re at it, health care for everybody, free child care, and free education. Yes, we can afford it, assuming the current trade wars don’t wreck our economy completely.

And not just the rule of law, but a legal system that really treats everyone fairly.

I can think of more, but treating everyone fairly is my bottom line. We start there.