Many call these coronavirus times “The New Normal.” I hope not. I hope, instead, to see groups of small children playing joyfully together, friends hugging when they meet on the street, multigenerational families gathering at the holidays, and being able to convey humor and warmth through a visible smile. I look forward to conversing with friends in crowded cafés, seeing live performances in theaters full of eager patrons, and so much more. When “The New Normal” was touted back in the spring, I chose instead to refer to these times as “The Temporary Abnormal,” but that never caught on. Lately I’ve been trying out “The New Dystopia.”
What are the characteristics of The New Dystopia?
- The billionaire class is making great and speedy strides towards becoming the trillionaire class.
- Healthy college students having low-key parties—or even just filling a classroom—are now considered a menace to society.
- Search engines and social media companies that have near monopolies on the flow of information are censoring information they deem “unscientific” because people can’t be trusted to judge for themselves.
- Food banks have seen sharp rises in families seeking assistance, but we’re told “the stock market is doing great.”
- The current, popularly accepted scientific views on the coronavirus are the only correct or acceptable ones, even though in the past popular scientific views sometimes turned out to be dangerously incorrect (consider that both DDT, the now-banned pesticide whose inventor received a Nobel Prize, and the toxic herbicide glyphosate were once deemed safe for humans and signs of scientific progress).
- There are no longer healthy people, just “asymptomatic” ones.
- It used to be considered good for children to go to school, learn in-person from their teachers, see friends and spend hours outdoors; now it’s preferable for them to spend hours in isolation in front of a computer.
- Fear is rampant, and if you’re not terrified then there’s something wrong with you.
- Anyone who questions the mainstream narrative is obviously a conspiracy theorist or just plain stupid because the mainstream narrative is always correct (even though, for example, following 9/11 The New York Times mistakenly reported that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, providing a pretext for a devastating war that continues to this day).
- Amazon’s sales skyrocket while small local shops and restaurants curtail hours and offer curbside service to stem the tide of lost business, or they go out of business completely.
- Having a healthy skepticism towards leaders and technocrats used be a sign of a discerning intellect (remember the bumper sticker “Question Authority”?); now it seems nearly everyone trusts that leaders and technocrats are acting purely in the public’s best interest.
- What used to be in-person gatherings are now “spreader events.”
- Drug companies knowingly harmed the public in the past in the shameless pursuit of profit (remember Vioxx and OxyContin, responsible for thousands of deaths and a plague of addiction in the U.S.?); now they are selflessly and tirelessly laboring to save us from the scourge of the coronavirus (and if they screw up with a Warp Speed product that bypasses accepted safety testing, they have legal immunity from lawsuits — the only guaranteed immunity there is).
- Walking alone in the woods without a mask is now a dangerous activity.
- Many think it’s great that a rich software developer exerts outsized influence over worldwide public health policy. What’s next? Will Apple stores open up healthcare clinics?
- A doctor stated recently on CNN that “One of the things we want to make sure people understand is that they should not be unnecessarily alarmed if there are reports … of someone or multiple people dying within a day or two of their [coronavirus] vaccination who are residents of a long-term care facility. That would be something we would expect, as a normal occurrence, because people die frequently in nursing homes.” Hmmm… I wonder if that logic might also apply to some of the more than 100,000 long-term care residents, including hospice patients, whose deaths were attributed to the coronavirus in the first place.
- Laws and policies that devastate the lives of millions in the name of keeping us safe are acceptable—no questions asked or allowed.
I could go on… I wonder: Is this the type of society we want? Has the loss of so many things — large and small — that give existence meaning, provide life-sustaining income and routines to families and individuals, and provide enjoyment, recreation and relaxation for body, mind and soul really been necessary? One day, in the future, will people be able to decide it’s now all right to go back to normal? My concern is that we might become so psychologically conditioned by our current circumstances that we might willingly cling to The New Dystopia as The New Normal. I wonder. And I hope we have the wisdom and courage to choose something better.
