There’s no ‘going back to normal’
While I realize that this headline is perhaps the last thing you want to see over your breakfast burrito or bagel, it’s been on my mind lately. As many remember, the phrase “going back to normal” was an understandable desire often heard during the height of Covid, when we all found ourselves in some frightening new reality with no idea how it would end. The hope was that, once the pandemic ceased, we’d go back to whatever calm and settled life we inhabited in 2019. Needless to say, such a prophecy failed to materialize. Still, the threat that all our systems would begin to shut down was the last thing on the minds of most Americans.
Profound events, however brief, have always redirected nations and peoples. 1865 and 1945 had nothing in common with 1861 and 1941. For better or worse, the Civil War and World War II irrevocably changed the United States into an entire new identity. For those of us who came of age during the Sixties, anyone time-traveling from 1960 to 1970 would think they had arrived at a completely different planet, so stark were the changes in merely one decade.
Everyone has a different definition of what “going back to normal” means to them. But I believe the common denominator is returning to a time period when there was less stress or worry. Days when you could watch the evening news without being reduced to a state of debilitating terror or walk around your neighborhood without looking furtively over your shoulder. This is going back to normal in its most benign sense.
I admit to harping on the belief that nostalgia and romanticizing the past is a dead-end, but I do it, too. I think about how much fun and exciting it was to be a kid growing up in New York City in the 1950s, conveniently forgetting how dangerous, filthy and polluted it was back then. The sky color was usually a grayish tan and swimming in, or eating fish from, the Hudson and East Rivers could cost you your life. I’m sure those in Taos also yearn for their version of a contented past as well. Wistfulness is a common human trait.
Unfortunately, others have ideas of “going back to normal” that are cruel, dangerous and malevolent. Vladimir Putin’s version is to drag Ukraine back into the old Soviet Empire, no matter how many of its citizens he has to rape or murder. Other nations across the world want to restore ethnic purity or regain regional domination, both at someone else’s expense. Here at home, the Supreme Court’s idea of “going back to normal” is to overturn Roe v. Wade and annul a halfcentury of women’s reproductive rights. When I heard of their draft decision, my first thought was that LGBT protections would be next on the chopping block. To white, conservative Republicans, going back to normal means erasing civil and human rights that Americans fought for and suffered to gain over the course of my lifetime while pretending that certain types of people, books and histories don’t exist.
Climate change and global warming, of course, are stark reminders that going back to normal just ain’t in the cards. For confirmation, all we Taoseños have to do is look out the window at the pall of wildfire smoke covering Northern New Mexico. “New” normal has replaced “going back” to it.
Looking at the big picture, the entire human race is in uncharted territory, and Ghost Dancing back to the past won’t work. Believe me, I wish it did, because I like comfort, safety and freedom from fear as much as anyone else. But at the risk of sounding like some New Age-nik, I’m aware on a deeper level that we’re here to witness these changes, as we hang on for dear life and, hopefully, affect them so that the future is better than the past. That might involve old entrenched systems giving way to newer structures that I cannot yet begin to comprehend.
When I think about humanity heading into the future, I envision a tractor-trailer speeding around a tight curve at 80 miles per hour, with half its wheels off the pavement and the rig a fraction of a millimeter away from tumbling over a cliff. Whether that truck will perish or right itself is a matter of luck, grace and the driver coming to his senses and making the correct decisions. So it will be with us, but it might be one close call.