The New Normal

The New “Normal”

I think the most telling part of the movie Titanic was when the well to do people on the ill fated voyage were first in line for the lifeboats, believing their first class tickets entitled them to a second chance at a first choice salvation.

And in many ways, unfortunately, that has been the case in our society. Of the estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard the Titanic, more than 1,500 died, making the sinking at the time one of the deadliest of a single ship and the deadliest peacetime sinking of a superliner or cruise ship to date.

Many movie goers and history buffs recoiled at the notion that the privilege of wealth buys access to life. We’d like to believe that when an equalizing threat faces humanity, that we roll up our sleeves, rooted in our humanness and unite against a common adversary.

But is it really so hard to believe that after over a year of quarantine and isolation and the heralding of vaccines that we as a society have become any more benevolent than the passengers of the Titanic?

It seems these days everyone is talking about “getting back to normal”.

It’s understandable. Our lives have been disrupted globally and ubiquitously on a global scale unparalleled in recent memory. People have died, others live with disabilities from COVID-19. Businesses and industries came to a grinding halt, some to never return again. Small businesses, neighborhood staples, were buried. Many people have struggled with rents, mortgages and food security issues, some intensified by the pandemic.

Many of us were not able to visit or hug family members and sadly some of them died before we were able to.

Health care workers, essential workers and first responders cannot “unsee” the horrors of the past year in emergency rooms. There are whole families that most generations of elders. Parents and teachers navigated the challenging waters of how to educate a generation in the age of digital divides, working parents. We saw a rise in suicides and mental health crisis, on a time when isolation was key to our survival.

Culture wars. Masks verses no masks. Vaccines - salvation, skeptical or experimental? Stimulus or no stimulus? Waiting for a check to pay rent with mass unemployment on the horizon and whole economic sectors obliterated, with new ones created. Working from home became an inevitable reality for many, while others were forced to leave their families to be on the front lines serving the public like grocery store workers. Common ground became not so common.

We struggle to grapple with a wave of endemic racism, a preexisting condition which when paired COVID-19 exposed the sick nature of what was covered by our veil of democracy.

We dealt with an explosive wave of nationalist xenophobia violence and rhetoric, from anti-masking to the assault on the Capitol invoked by the very people who claimed to uphold democracy betrayed it once again.

The doors of our churches and houses of faith closed, as we had to learn to navigate and form digital avatars and even digital altars to engage in our faith traditions.

Homeless shelters closed and we struggled with the question of how to provide for the most vulnerable in our society, whom we saw everyday before the pandemic but our shared health crisis now made caring for them “vital”.

And then there are those among us that gleefully are happy about the light at the end of the tunnel, talking about line jumping and travel plans, seemingly oblivious to the stark realities and carnage that our unfurled society has presented in the past year.

Even with variants on the rise and mask wearing on the decline, we cling to hope to restore the “American” way of life.

The vaccine has come symbolizes a return to the good old days of “normal” so much so that even as we work through the important work of years of systemic racism to help promote it in our communities of color, some accuse anyone with questions of being anti-science or “unamerican”.

I do not wish to extinguish joy of finding the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, a vaccine that enables us to hope to hug family members one day and saving lives. We all must work to end this pandemic, or at the very least, manage life around it.

But it leaves me wondering — Is there a vaccine for our lack of humanity? Is there a cure to all the ill that was always there uncovered by a common foe as cold as the waters that sank the fateful Titanic when we as humanity face a common, brutal and revealing adversary?

Have we learned anything at all?

For many, nothing will be normal again. Normalcy is erasure of all of the struggles and lessons learned. George Floyd’s daughters life will never be normal. Neither will all the people who lost their loved ones this past year. And for many normal without access to health care, food security, employment and basic human rights was not so good.

So as we are reminded of the grief and loss of our way of life, maybe we can take time to reflect on looking at society with new eyes, sharpened by the pandemic.

It may not look normal. And perhaps, that’s the point.