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Jun. 15th, 2020 11:00 pmThe US is a bit too busy struggling with racism to pay any attention to the coronavirus pandemic at the moment. However, elsewhere I keep hearing and reading thinkpieces about whether we're likely to radically change our way of living as a result of the pandemic. I'm here from the future to tell you the answer: nope. Not even slightly.
Back in the before days when nobody cared about the 1919/20 flu epidemic much, I used to wonder how something so vast that killed more than 50 million people could disappear so comprehensively from the public consciousness. Well, here in post-Covid NZ, I now know why, and why it's unlikely that once the rest of the world catches up with us anybody's going to be worrying about massive changes to our way of life. Once you go through something like the pandemic and come out the other side (more or less), you just want to put it behind you. You miss your old life, and you want it back. And when you get it back, it's as if it never went away. We've only been at Alert Level 1 (normal life except for closed borders) for a single week and already I keep being surprised reading about people overseas wearing masks and social distancing.
So don't hold your breath for a brave new world to rise from the ashes of the pandemic. Hopefully the effort to change institutional racism will have better luck.
Back in the before days when nobody cared about the 1919/20 flu epidemic much, I used to wonder how something so vast that killed more than 50 million people could disappear so comprehensively from the public consciousness. Well, here in post-Covid NZ, I now know why, and why it's unlikely that once the rest of the world catches up with us anybody's going to be worrying about massive changes to our way of life. Once you go through something like the pandemic and come out the other side (more or less), you just want to put it behind you. You miss your old life, and you want it back. And when you get it back, it's as if it never went away. We've only been at Alert Level 1 (normal life except for closed borders) for a single week and already I keep being surprised reading about people overseas wearing masks and social distancing.
So don't hold your breath for a brave new world to rise from the ashes of the pandemic. Hopefully the effort to change institutional racism will have better luck.
