I keep seeing people post on line how great the party will be on the day that restrictions are lifted. Here in Washington State we’re on Stay At Home through May 4th, leading people online to suggest a big Cinco de Mayo celebration if restrictions are lifted.
That’s beyond a bad idea, because there will not be a single moment when everything magically turns ok. Rather, at some point we should see a cautious, step-by-step set of adjustments.
But beyond the official policy, what we have yet to see how individual people and families will react when it’s allegedly safe to go out in a crowd again.
In a few short weeks, my family and I have gained habits that will be with us for a long time.
- An awareness of touch surfaces in public places and strategies for avoiding them
- The ability to not touch your own face for as long as required
- Careful planning of the route on which we walk our dog, avoiding blind corners or narrow spots.
- Weighing the risk of any planned trip compared to the need (usually risk wins and we find a way to get by without)
- How to decon when coming back into the house (clothes straight into the washer, person straight into the shower, bleach wipe all surfaces along the route of entry)
And we’re incredibly lucky. Our one symptomatic family member is recovering and got test results back a few days ago, negative (just the flu, I guess, whew). I still have my job. We have what we need.
When I ponder how we will re-enter the outside world, I picture a careful evaluation. Each trip, each plan.
Forget pent-up demand. We have learned to reorder our priorities starting with protecting ourselves and our community.
When I see TV economists predicting a strong rebound as people surge back out to regular life, it rings false.
As cautious as I expect we’ll be, I can only imagine how the more deeply affected survivors will approach their daily life. How will they cope with their PTSD?
PTSD? Well, now. PTS reactions aren’t necessarily a disorder. People have them for a reason, which is to process the trauma, and in many cases to understand how to avoid a similar experience in the future.
Every one of us, whether directly affected by tragedy from Covid or not, will deal with some form of dislocation or trauma. We will each need to find our own pace of return, not to the old normal, but to some new form of it.
And we should not let anyone tell us how we should go about it.
In a remarkable essay “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting” (forge.medium.com/...), author Julio Vincent Gambuto describes how we’re likely to face a vast onslaught from commercial and political forces to go forth in a great rush into the world, and most importantly to spend.
Billions of dollars will be spent on advertising, messaging, and television and media content to make you feel comfortable again. …. The need for comfort will be real, and it will be strong. And every brand in America will come to your rescue, dear consumer, to help take away that darkness and get life back to the way it was before the crisis.
But Gambuto provides us another way of thinking about the future. From the deepest crisis, opportunity.
What the crisis has given us is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see ourselves and our country in the plainest of views. At no other time, ever in our lives, have we gotten the opportunity to see what would happen if the world simply stopped. Here it is. We’re in it. ….
And because it is rarer than rare, it has brought to light all of the beautiful and painful truths of how we live. ….
From one citizen to another, I beg of you: Take a deep breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud.
We will all face imperatives, especially returning to work when that’s possible. We’ll have strong desires, including the wish for companionship we all have missed. We’ll get a endless diet of breathless media and advertising content pushing us forward like lemmings.
But ultimately we get to choose the manner in which we emerge. Not President Crazypants. Not your state governor. Not your city or county government. And certainly not the talking heads.
Each of us will make our choices.
Perhaps we won’t get back the economy we once had, with thrilling green numbers bouncing their way up and up. Maybe we’ll get something better.
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About those naked mole rats. Yeah, they’re pretty cool. www.wired.com/…
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James R. Wells is the author of The Great Symmetry, a science fiction adventure celebrating the freedom of ideas. The story is set 300 years in the future, but that future world appears to be arriving about 299 years sooner than expected.