No way to turn the clock back!

THE goal of the combined endeavors of government and private sectors alike is to bring us back to “normalcy” — and that is where the quarrel begins. There have arisen various interesting, confusing, outrageous terms such as “new normal,” “better normal,” ”different normal” and others have vehemently insisted that what they want is a return to “normal” — and by that they mean what Barbra Streisand had crooned about: “The way we were!” Unfortunately or, really, fortunately, that cannot happen. Contemporary human society is reflexive society. It does not only allow things to happen. It closely and astutely takes cognizance of it and redirects decisions, actions, plans and policies.

There are some “critical thresholds” that change the trajectory of history. The world wars were examples of such thresholds as was the dawning of the age of computers and artificial intelligence. Ethical thinking and questions on God have never been framed in the same way again after Auschwitz, and the Catholic Church has taken strident steps in paths heretofore unknown after Vatican 2. A pandemic like the coronavirus disease 2019 was — and still is —- cannot leave us unchanged. Many scientists and anthropologists had foretold that the world was ripe for the devastation of a pandemic — and the coronavirus proved them right. It would be foolhardy to ignore what we have learned because of a deleterious attachment to “the way we were.”

Earlier, I wrote lengthily on what we, educators, should have learned. First, the classroom need not be the center of instructional gravity. Second, we have underused the potential of the student to learn by himself, primarily through independent research. Without a doubt, we shall still need classrooms and the traditional lecture has its own place in colleges and universities, and even in basic education, but during the period of the pandemic, despite going through the learning curve, educators did not bring instruction to a screeching halt. We improvised, we innovated, we exploited to the hilt alternative modes of delivery, including online delivery and the distribution of written modules. Why should we go back to how things were ( and have always been), constructing more classrooms to accommodate an ever-burgeoning school population when we now know that so many subjects can be taught in other ways, achieving the same, if not superior, results? And why should the teacher relish the role of narrator, driving herself hoarse and lulling her students into periods of somnolence, when students can be given reading and writing assignments according to a program drawn up jointly by mentor and mentored?

In government, we have learned that the many meetings that cause government functionaries to fly, motor to or crawl all the way to the insalubrious environment of Manila, are not really indispensable. We could do it with Zoom or even Facebook Messenger. We could efficiently transact through electronic means and save on paper — and save the trees. No “workshops,” that all too often were “work” in the morning and “shop” from noon till late at night, could be held, but we could do with “webinars” and “virtual conferences.” What point might there be in turning our backs on all this so that we might return to the inefficient and wasteful doings of the “normal”?

The Church has also learned -— and should not forget. Unless the home is evangelized, in vain do church leaders labor. I do not refer principally to SWAP (Sunday Worship in the Absence of a Priest) but to the more fundamental realization that being in church is for husband and wife to live the sacrament of matrimony, and for children and parents alike to live their baptism. Faith must have its roots in the domestic church, otherwise it may spring up and instantly wither, or, worse, be snatched away instantly by the counter- evangelical culture so prevalent in our days. As for charity, I have never liked “charity begins at home” — because it often remains there, but the home must certainly be a school of charity — and Covid made that clear as keeping members of the same family in confinement at close quarters for so long tested patience, endurance and understanding. We also learned that social media was a heretofore untapped resource and realized that it is in fact a potent pulpit for evangelization, whether new or renewed.

Were all these lessons learned, skills acquired, ideas grasped only “coping mechanisms” for the pandemic? Should they not be constitutive of our reordered reality, that which should constitute our normal?