More On The Pandemic And Its Discontents

 I read the whole Times piece from yesterday's post.  As I got to the end, this bit hit me hard:

These confessions came alongside periodic expressions of hope that things would surely have to change; that amid all of this, we, as a society, couldn’t ignore our many injustices and baseline dysfunctions any longer. The willingness to see that dysfunction, and to mark its distance from our ideals, seemed itself constructive, even momentous. “I think we needed to see how ugly it was in order to realize what were we really dealing with,” one man said.

And now, three years later? I’m wary of even typing that last paragraph. As new “post-pandemic” norms assert themselves, there’s pressure to regard that sense of empathy unlocking, of possibilities opening up, as squishy and naïve. It seems to be yet another aspect of the pandemic that a lot of people don’t really want to talk about anymore, part of the overall fever dream from which society is shaking itself awake.

“I often think about all of this as anticlimactic,” Swidler, the sociologist, told me. She was genuinely surprised: At first, the pandemic seemed to create potential for some big and benevolent restructuring of American life. But it mostly didn’t happen. Instead, she said, we seemed to treat the pandemic as a short-term hiccup, no matter how long it kept dragging on, and basically waited it out. “We didn’t strive to change society,” she told me. “We strived to get through our day.” Marooned in anomie and instability, we built little, rickety bridges to some other, slightly more stable place. “It’s amazing that something this dramatic could happen, with well over a million people dead and a public health threat of massive proportions, and it really didn’t make all that much difference,” Swidler said. “Maybe one thing it shows us is that the general drive to normalize things is incredibly powerful, to master uncertainty by feeling certain enough.”

This hit me because of the idea from sociology that we define ourselves by our constant interaction with others. I am a father, a husband, a friend, a coach, a teacher, a customer, a foe. The pandemic unmoored me, in particular, from being a teacher. My mother died (not from Covid) was I still a son? Was I a teacher if my "teaching" was an imperfect muddle of Zoom classes and hybrid "learning."

But my hope - and I think the hope of many others - was that after the trauma and dislocations of the pandemic, we would use the opportunity to create newer and better institutions. I mean, shit, we are no better prepared for the next pandemic than we were in 2019. Arguably, we are worse off, because of the vicious polarization that crept into pandemic mitigation. If avian flu jumps into humans, we will be powerless to stop it, because we are "beyond" our tolerance to take basic steps to face an implacable virus.

In particular, I was hoping that the nature of my profession might use this dislocation to change. Instead, the worst parts of my job have often be exacerbated - top-down decision making that makes my job tougher, an administration increasingly divorced from the realities of classroom teaching and the state of young people today - and the best parts have been made harder.

Near the end, the author concludes:

In this view, one remarkable thing about the archive at Columbia is that it chronicles how society confronted a new source of suffering that seemed intolerable, and then, day by day, beat it back just enough to be tolerated. Over time, we simply stirred the virus in with all the other forms of disorder and dysfunction we live with — problems that appear to be acceptable because they merely inconvenience some large portion of people, even as they devastate others. If this makes you uneasy, as an ending to our pandemic story, maybe it’s only because, with Covid, we are still able to see the indecency of that arrangement clearly. We haven’t yet made it invisible to ourselves. Right now, we’re still struggling to stretch some feeling of normalcy, like a heavy tarp, over the top.

That said, it’s not inevitable that this is the end of the story. We tend to gloss history into a sequence of precursors that carried society to the present — and to think of that present as a permanent condition that we’ll inhabit from now on. We have started glossing the pandemic in this way already. But because we don’t totally understand where that experience has delivered us, we don’t know the right gloss to give it. I would argue that if you have the feeling that we’re moving on from Covid, but it doesn’t feel as if we’re moving in any particular direction — as if we’re just kind of floating — this is why.

"Normal" had been defined earlier as what we can safely ignore. "Novel" could be dangerous, both as a novel coronavirus or a novel person or experience. We crave "normal." We may think of ourselves as individuals or iconoclasts, but ultimately, we need the security of "normal." When Covid stripped that away from us, we hoped that the "new normal" would be an improvement. 

Instead, we rushed to conclude the abnormality of the Covid Era. We rushed past the opportunity to make things better - especially in terms of work and what it means to us.

This isn't the fault of Joe Biden or even Donald Trump. Nor is it - I imagine - uniquely American.

We caromed from Covid to George Floyd to January 6th to Ukraine to inflation...everything continues to move under our feet. So we rushed past whatever opportunities Covid gave us to restructure "normal" only to find that normal itself isn't there anymore.