A Better Normal

As we move out of the worst of the pandemic and the world does its best to catch its breath and get back to normal, a sense of apprehension is beginning to build inside me, growing into a choking fear that makes it hard to breathe. While some run towards this goal, I find myself dragging my feet. When my friends tell me how great things will be when this is nothing but a bad memory, I keep silent, unable to say out loud how I really feel.

I don’t want to go back to normal.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying I want this virus to last forever. I’m not saying that the lives lost haven’t haven’t been tragic, senseless or devastating. None of this is acceptable. None of this should have happened.

But I can’t help but wonder if everybody else remembers “normal” differently to me. Before lock-down, there were hundreds of people sleeping - dying - on the streets. Child poverty was at an all-time high, our taxes were helping bomb people in Syria, the welfare state was on the verge of collapse due to years of underfunding, and the people we are now hailing as heroes were underpaid, understaffed and worked to breaking point. We were ignoring climate change warnings hoping that “out of sight out of mind” applies to natural disasters, as animals became extinct around us at alarming rates. Greed, inequality, hatred, unaccountability: they’d all been normalised to the point they felt like an inescapable part of the human condition. Surely this isn’t the “normal” everybody wants to go back to?

It’s not unusual for humanity to live with blinkers on. Historically, it’s hardly difficult to find some of the biggest crises that civilisation has faced and wonder, “How did they not see it coming? How did they not stop it sooner?” Human beings are wired for instant gratification. We often struggle to implement change that won’t help us immediately. Think of that last-minute essay that you know you should have started months ago, or avoiding going shopping for milk because you’re too comfortable at home, knowing you’ll regret it the next day when there’s not enough for breakfast. We know we should cut back on single-use plastics, on meat consumption, on flying - but we find it hard to do because global warming is so far away, so abstract, and that holiday is now, that burger is here.

I look around me right now, amongst the tragedy, the death, the fear, and I see more understanding and kindness than I have ever seen. Neighbours who had never before exchanged a ‘good morning’ offering to pay each other’s bills if either were to struggle financially. Strangers doing each other’s shopping to protect those at risk. Nature, suddenly, a goddess amongst men, a place of wonder, of freedom, of admiration. Baking bread and growing herbs is a pastime for all, and on the neighbourhood forum angry threads about noisy dogs and left-out bins have been replaced with sourdough recipes.

This pandemic has taught us so much. It’s shown us that so many can work from home, meaning less traffic, less congestion, and, more importantly, more time with loved ones. It’s proved how quickly pollution levels can drop: in the first two months of lock-down air pollution dropped to the point that the Himalayas could be seen from parts of India for the first time in 30 years. In two months. The pandemic has slapped us in the face with the fact that some of the people we’ve been most dismissive of are the ones we need the most - the farmhands, the supermarket workers, the hospital staff.

We’ve been given a chance to change things, and I hope that, when we beat this crisis, the world that comes out the other end is one we barely recognise. A world where we not only coexist with nature, but we cherish it, fight for it, protect it. A world where animals are not seen as guests in a world we run, but as hosts of a home we’ve taken over. That we remember the companies that supported their workers, and those that demanded governmental bailouts whilst their untaxed profits sat in bank accounts in tax-haven countries. I hope we remember that it was the supermarket stackers and the hospital cleaners that kept us going, and not the lawyers in the £2k suits nor the bankers in their BMWs. I hope we fight for the nurses and doctors that stayed away from their families to keep them safe whilst they saved lives; sleeping on hospital floors, with marks on their faces from the protective gear they’d been wearing for 12 hours - protective gear that was in dangerously short supply. I hope we hold the government accountable for how its under-funding of the public sector has cost tens of thousands of lives - and counting.

I see the world fighting to get back to where it was before disaster struck, and I wonder if instead we shouldn’t be striving to build something new. I see us heading towards… I can’t quite tell. I can’t tell if it’s a yesterday, or a tomorrow. And while I wait to find out, I’m scared; because this was a warning. A warning that life as we’re living it is unsustainable. A warning that we can’t keep turning our backs to all the danger-signs, hoping it will be somebody else’s problem. And I hope this has shown us we need to face up to it and make a change. Because ‘normal’ is not an option. We need a new normal.

A better normal.