Let’s never go back to normal
So here we are. Most of us trapped in our houses. Limited to a weekly groceries run and maybe a clandestine walk around the neighbourhood after sundown. We’re anxious and scared. We’re bored. A weekend is now watching TikToks and picking up fights on Twitter. Even the most introverted and secluded among us are longing for some form of human contact. How good it would feel to hug a friend. Hang out in a pub or go to the movies. Visit grandparents. Dance all night and have sex with a stranger. In these times of uncertainty, we find ourselves asking: when will things go back to normal?
But you know what? Fuck normal.
Normal was when UK left the EU.
Normal was when Trump, Orban, Netanyahu, Bolsonaro, Modi, Kaczyński, and Erdogan took and consolidated power.
Normal was when refugees drowned in the Mediterranean.
When the US had concentration camps.
When Saudi Arabia dropped an American-made bomb on a Yemeni school bus.
When we polluted air, water, and soil beyond repair.
When measles came back.
When banks crashed the economy and governments bailed them out, leaving people out to dry.
When CEOs made 300x times more than their workers.
When every winter homeless people froze to death.
When Millenials never lived without a flatmate and couldn’t dream of home ownership.
When even renting in big cities became a struggle, because landlords couldn’t just be happy with half of your income so they kicked you out and put the apartment on Airbnb.
When we gave away our privacy to Facebook and Google and they exploited that to undermine democracy in the name of profit.
When Apple and Amazon made unfathomable amounts of money and still dodged taxes.
When my friend had to travel abroad to get an abortion.
When every woman you know experienced sexual harassment.
What’s happening right now isn’t a deviation from normal. It’s a consequence. We subordinated society to GDP growth and reduced human life to economic output. It’s only logical that the moment the economy slowed down to a crawl, the entire thing fell apart. We let technocrats convince us that we lived in a meritocracy and that markets were the self-balancing answer to everything. Turns out markets only know the right answers when you need to deregulate housing, gouge insulin prices, or refuse workers employee status. But when rich people — whose wealth is tied to stock market’s performance — start feeling the heat, we suddenly remember that actually, economics is a game of make-believe between governments and financial institutions and we can just turn on the money printer to save the economy. How about we tried to save the people for once? If we can conjure unlimited money for quantitative easing and put it into circulation through corporate lending, we can do that to lift everyone out of poverty and give them shelter and access to healthcare, education, and culture. We just choose not to.
When the pandemic ends, all we’ll hear about will be going back to normal, because people shaping the narrative are the small minority who benefited from the old normal. Media, political and business leaders, rich celebrities. People for whom social progress is, at best, a performance. And I fear they will succeed and get their normalcy back. UK will have another decade of austerity, but maybe Richard Branson will fund a statue to honor the NHS workers. No one will fund statues for shop assistants and delivery drivers because poor people don’t deserve recognition. Gal Gadot will sing Imagine again but this time from a busy city square. Woody Allen will find a publisher for his book and it will receive favorable reviews. Just kidding, this already happened because we won’t stop giving creeps a platform even in a pandemic. Football World Cup will take place in Qatar despite years of human rights abuse by the organizers. Millions of fans will still watch it and Coca-Cola and Visa will launch World Cup-themed ads. Anti-vaxxers will organize more rallies and kill more children. A conservative rapist will win the United States presidential race.
I wish instead of turning back towards the broken, disappointing normalcy that brought us here, we looked forward to fixing the failures of the socio-economic system that were laid bare by this crisis. Once the world starts recovering from the pandemic, we should come forward in international solidarity and, to borrow a phrase from the Occupy movement, demand our leaders start serving the 99%.
We should recognize shelter and healthcare as human rights and provide them to everyone.
We should guarantee legal and economic protections reflecting the essential status of the people who saved us during this crisis: doctors, nurses, warehouse and delivery workers, shop assistants, food processing workers, garbage collectors, workers at electric and water treatment plants.
We should untangle human existence from one’s economic output and even more so from the output of one’s assets. No billionaires and landlords but recognition for domestic and informal labour as in no way lesser than salaried work. Kate Flood put it more eloquently than I could:
We should demand global corporations pay their due in taxes. Their wealth is created by us, as workers, and should support our communities.
We should take drastic measures to respond to the climate crisis. If the current system is falling apart because of the spread of one virus, imagine the consequences of an environmental collapse.
We should have health and environmental policy driven by science and common good. Never by faith or profit.
Most of the above wouldn’t be feasible under the old normal. But all of it would serve a more just society. And pubs and movies would still be there to go to — perhaps with more people able to enjoy them. So maybe let’s never go back to normal.
