Our entitlement to “post pandemic” normalcy is showing; it’s not pretty.
The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is a gorgeous creation. It ensures that we all have access to education, to clean water, to safety; amongst many other essential and inalienable rights. It does not ensure, nor does any other declarative document meant to guide us to listen to our better angels, normalcy. Since the COVID-19 pandemic moved across the globe too many of us are behaving as though the whimsical lives we lived before then are our birth rights. Spoiler: they aren’t.
The whining that we are doing about how we deserve a swift return to that kind of normalcy is not a good look for us. We seem to have forgotten that the before times where some of us enjoyed lives full to brimming of annual pilgrimages to music festivals, daily indoor yoga classes with other people in pretty workout outfits, gorgeously crafted dinners out with friends, perfectly curated school play performances of our adorable kids front and center; well, these kinds of lived experiences left out the majority of humanity. Spoiler: these kinds of comfortable days aren’t normal for most people on earth at all.
The average US family’s income in 2019, pre-pan times, was $69,560. The average income, globally, in 2019 was $10,000. That, my friends, is a staggering gap that the pandemic did not narrow.
I offer this meditation as we move through the next round of our pandemic induced culture wars: before expressing one’s discontent about how life before the pandemic was better, consider for whom it was better and at what cost.
This pandemic continues to serve as a great equalizer. This radical and unsolicited (by those of use who were and mostly still are, comfortable) shift could ultimately enable us, as a global community, to center those with most to lose. It’s up to us.
