Honing in on the New Normal

If it is still 2021 when you are reading this, then I apologize. It's not really for you. It's for posterity.

Greetings, reader of the future! I hope we managed to reverse the climate change trend toward hotter, colder, stormier, drought-ier (yes, I saw that word used in a legitimate news article) weather for you guys. 

Hey, speaking of that...

A couple of days ago, the CDC announced that fully vaccinated (against Covid-19) people could refrain from wearing masks even indoors in most situations. Yay! James got his second shot two days ago, so is still a couple of weeks out from maximum immunity, but D and I are both considered "fully" and I look forward to ditching the masks!

I know a lot of people aren't. They want to keep wearing them, either for a while, until some benchmark they've chosen is reached; or seasonally, say to avoid the flu, which was barely a blip on the radar this past year, as we were distanced and masked.

Covid brought a lot of divisions to the forefront, in some really disconcerting ways.

The first is related a bit to masks. There are people, including most of the folks who were in my social circles a decade ago, who believed mask mandates to be compliance drills by the government, the first step onto a slippery slope to-- ??? Wearing burkhas? Never talking to anyone outside of the home? Closing all businesses to force the populace to be dependent on the government for income? To seize all guns? 

Most of the safety measures and protocol and solutions to the pandemic were seen by some as a great government conspiracy. The vaccines supposedly make you sterile. Or have something that inserts a tracker into your body so the government can see where you are at all times (even though you do that voluntarily with your smart phone, so...). Or will kill everyone who got one within the next decade (if this blog goes dark, you'll know why!). 

The initial "lock-downs" -- which weren't, by the way, as essential travel was never prohibited and we could go to the grocery store and get take-out if restaurants chose to stay open -- were seen as an overreach if not intended to destroy our economy, then doing it carelessly anyway.

Not allowing people to go to others' homes at first was seen as some kind of "divide and conquer" mess, I guess. I don't claim to understand the way people think.

A lot of people who felt all public safety measures were some kind of infringement on their personal rights point to inconsistent messaging. Yes, the CDC initially said masks didn't help; then they said that they absolutely DO help and people should wear them. Yes, that is inconsistent. But a couple of things were at play that helped me give grace to the folks in charge: 1) This was a NOVEL coronavirus and not much was known about it. 2) There wasn't enough personal protection equipment for the medical professionals, and they didn't want a run on what there was. This was smart thinking, the way people hoarded toilet paper and pasta and flour. 

It devolved into a political thing: If you were a Democrat, you wore masks and stayed home and lived in "fear." If you were a Republican, you enjoyed your freedom and did whatever the hell you wanted, and that's what this country is about, after all; plus, there's only a small chance you'll die, so why be such a pansy? There are exceptions. I know right-leaning people (and am related to people) who took trying not to catch or spread the virus seriously. And I know left-leaning people who are quite skeptical of the rapidly-developed vaccine and won't get it.

Another thing that the virus laid bare was the economic fault lines in our society, many of which run along racial lines. 

James has a job that he was able to do from home, and his company stable enough to weather the initial decline in business without having to cut salaries, so we were able to continue our lives without much economic instability.

But many jobs couldn't be done from home, like employees of grocers and restaurants, and in the medical profession. So they had some really no-win choices to make: go to work and risk infection, or don't work and don't get paid and probably get fired. Some people didn't have a choice: their employer couldn't afford to pay them and had to let them go. Some people didn't have childcare for their kids who were suddenly not in school, and had to wing it.

The jobs we suddenly glorified have been historically pooh-poohed as jobs that people who don't have a "good education" do, an almost morality tale about the dangers of failing to pursue higher education. Yet we expected these folks to happily show up, deal with people who were angry about mask mandates, put in all of their hours, expose themselves to the exhalations of hundreds of people every day, and often take public transit there and back.

The death rate of people who identify as Latinae was much higher than the death rate of white people. Black folks also died at a higher rate than whites. In addition to jobs, my guess is that things that played into this are: population density in households and neighborhoods, reliance on public transit and carpooling, and lack of access to medical care (from lack of insurance, fear of attracting the attention of authorities/ICE, and a general and understandable skepticism of the medical industry), in addition to living either in urban areas where the healthcare systems were overwhelmed, or in rural areas where there are no longer hospitals.

In addition to the 8 million people who slipped into poverty between May and October 2020, there was a huge toll on healthcare professionals. Some were laid off when hospitals stopped doing elective procedures; others were reassigned to jobs outside of their expertise. Many were run ragged, and had to choose between taking care of patients and seeing their families. I have two friends who rented hotel rooms for weeks at a time so as not to bring home something to their kids and partners.

The stimulus payments lifted fully half of the children in poverty in the US out, so that's pretty exciting. The eviction moratoriums are just ending, so I hope both landlords and tenants are able to pull through this time okay. I understand that it's easy to assume all landlords are rich corporations, but they are not. And many have been financially hit by the fact that their tenants have not had to pay rent, and federal or state help is slow in coming.

In short: deadly disease aside, it's been a mess. It's showed a lot of weaknesses, including in our communities.

Homeschoolers, especially, seem to lean more toward the "masks and gathering limits are an affront to my personal autonomy." I have a friend (who's not a homeschooler, but kind of the same mentality) who moved to another city where they weren't enforcing the statewide mandate, because she wanted her kids to have "a normal childhood."

I can only make decisions for myself and my family, but I think it's okay to teach your kids how to pivot during a trying circumstance, how to pitch in for the health of all, and that sometimes, things just aren't "normal." How can you build resiliency if you never encounter this kind of thing?

Anyway, we're a long way from "normal," but at least there's a light at the end of the tunnel now. I'd really hoped that a global pandemic might lead to more understanding and cooperation, but that just seems not to be super possible, on a large scale. In fact, I might be tempted to be more discouraged if the freeze hadn't happened, and we hadn't had some neighbors step up in a huge way. I think maybe the smaller communities are where the magic happens. And that part is nice.