The “New Normal” Is The Old Abnormal, With A Twist

A year ago, having the police storming your place for spending time with your extended family, would have been unconceivable. Only extreme, totalitarian regimes would have resorted to something like this, and probably only in very targeted cases.

Now, this is the norm. Like, literally, if you spend time with more than 6 people from your extended family (or 9 people or whatever the limit is in your version of cosmetic lockdown), in your own house, not doing anything loud, or unhealthy, just enjoying each other presence, you’re committing a crime.

That’s the world we live in now.

What we’ve been told is the “new normal” is actually the old abnormal. But with a twist.

Do you want to know what it is?

Are you sure?

Ok, here we go.

The biggest trick governments pulled was to make regular people feel responsible for spreading a disease, while completely avoiding their own responsibility for not scaling the health system.

Less and less people think along these lines: “well, there’s some shitty virus going on, and it’s contagious, so the government, to which we pay a lot of money, via tax and fines, would better move their assess and scale the health system, so we can cope with that.”

And more and more people are turning against each other for simple things (like walking on the streets, spending times with loved ones or just having fun) because they live in constant fear. More and more people are actually asking for even more isolation, honestly believing that this is the only solution.

It’s not the only solution. There’s a public health system, to which everyone contributes. That system, as broken and as incomplete as it was a year ago, should have been upgraded, patched, improved so it could cope with exponential increases in patients. There was time to do this. It’s not like we’re witnessing a zero day vulnerability. It’s been already a year. 12 months. 53 weeks. 365 days.

And, if we’re really honest with ourselves after this year, we have no other option but to face this ugly truth, that social distancing is only partially working, and those “just two weeks, to flatten the curve” turned into…