The times they are a-changing (but don’t gather round)

Few of us are in any doubt that the pandemic will change our societies and that we are not just living a mere “new normal” phase waiting to go back to the “old normal”. 

No. We all know, fear or hope this is a transition towards something else; that our societies will be very different once the whole world reaches the other end of this. 

But this is where certainties begin and end. No one really knows what expects us on the other side of the pandemic; not even our political and economic leaders – most of whom well meaning but totally unprepared to face something like this.

COVID-19 has locked us up in our homes freeing streets for animals to roam, reducing pollution, clearing the air in our streets which we now can’t enjoy and the seas where we are not allowed to go but -most of all- it has thrown up a question we have avoided for years: are we the problem? And if so, what is the solution?  

While we sit in our homes looking at our phones, we remember when we used to walk the streets looking at our phones and we begin to regret that we didn’t took less at our phones and more around us, while we had a chance. So much was going on but we did not see it. Maybe we do now: we will not go back to normality because normality was the problem – or at least part of the problem.

It is Easter time and  many people will be celebrating the Resurrection in isolation across the world (now we cannot leave our homes, the weather is unseasonably good, by the way). The Gospel already had it all so many centuries ago: the indecisive politicians, the liars, the traitors, the rejected foreigners, the crowds who will always choose Barabbas and the few who tell the truth but no one listens to them. Maybe this has gone on too long, now.

Our personal hopes for life after COVID-19 is that our societies will learn to shed the huge volume of uselessness which surrounds us like the polluted air in our cities. Useless rituals, habits, technology, relationships which bring no value to our lives. That ambition will not turn to selfishness, that we learn to respect our environment and all that lives in it -human and not- , that technology will be used to make our life better and not just more full of emptiness, that there will be more opportunities for everyone.

But most of all we hope, this time we will really learn to see.

Emily: [..]“Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it–every, every minute?

Stage Manager: No. (pause) The saints and poets, maybe they do some”. (“Our Town” Th. Wilder).