Things Will Never Get Back To Normal

This is not what you want to hear, but I’m going to say it. Things will never get back to normal again.

But that’s what we want, right?  We want to have this all over with and get back to life as it was in January. We want to swat all this unpleasantness away like it was a fly pestering us. We want to wake up tomorrow and bound out of bed and get back to the schedule and the pace of a usual weekday morning.

Sorry to tell you this, but that’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen at the end of this month.  We will be sheltering in place for a while. And when that is lifted, and maybe that’s the end of summer, the end of the year, or for some of us, when the vaccine is out.

But when we get back to normal, we will not be getting back to the normal we knew at the start of this year.

Of course, the administration is pushing for opening up society so business can get chugging along again. This is the administration that does nothing to dissuade voices that call for seniors to be willing to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the Economy. While the rest of the population kneels down and prays to the Dow Jones for salvation.

Things aren’t going to be normal ever again.  And here’s some ideas I have about things that won’t return to normal.

1.     Handshaking. Dr. Anthony Fauci says we should never shake hands again, but instead come up with other forms of greeting.  And how about hugs?  Will we quite as generous as we were before? Will we be quite selective about whom we hug?

2,     Hand washing and hand sanitizers.  The average person will be left with looking like what we before would have thought of as a germophobe.  We will be cleaner. We will urge our children to wash their hands all the time. And we will never be without hand sanitizer. That will be something we always stick in our pockets or briefcase or bags.

3.     Work. Big pause here. Do you really think your company is going to want to keep all that real estate, when they can have you work from home some or all of the time, and probably get more work out of you and not have to pay for space and a desk for you at the main office?

4.     Education.  Another pause.  Big pause. I think higher education will be irrevocably changed. Delivery of coursework will be more and more electronic. It makes sense, after all.  Get more students in, fewer professors, who are having to work harder to deliver the content.  Makes total economic sense for the colleges and universities. Maybe they can eventually sell some real estate and make some money off of that too.

Elementary and high school, I am not sure about.  I think they will be changed some but will the government encourage people to home school with support and pedagogy from a central place?  I am not sure, but for safety’s sake, maybe this will happen.  (I’d be interested in hearing any ideas from primary and secondary school teachers.)

5.     Very large gatherings, like music festivals, professional sporting events, large trade shows and conventions.  These will change also.  Will there be limits as to size? Will there be screening of attendees? Will people be required to wear masks?  Since there are projections that the COVID-19 virus is going to be around for quite a while, and could mutate,  who knows?

6.     More decentralized production of televised and live-streamed events.  For an example, look at the Saturday Night Live  program from last night.  Produced remotely. 



More of that?  More live-streamed musical performances instead of in front of audiences?

7.     More draconian policies will be enforced as we move back into society. Remember before you had to take off your shoes an belt and go through a scanner before boarding an airplane?  Somehow we accepted that and it became part of our new normal. What new policies and procedures will be imposed on us?

These all seem rather negative, don’t they?  And I think there are more possibilities how things will not get back to normal that I haven’t covered here.  Let me know what you think.

My next blog post, I’m going to talk about ways that it might be good if we didn’t get back to normal.  What are you noticing right now that you would not like to lose?

posted by Etta Worthington