No way to turn the clock back!

THE goal of the combined endeavors of government and private sectors alike is to bring us back to “normalcy” — and that is where the quarrel begins. There have arisen various interesting, confusing, outrageous terms such as “new normal,” “better normal,””different normal” and others have vehemently insisted that what they want is a return to “normal” — and by that they mean what Barbra Streisand had crooned about: “The way we were!” Unfortunately or, really, fortunately, that cannot happen. Contemporary human society is reflexive society. It does not only allow things to happen. It closely and astutely takes cognizance of it and redirects decisions, actions, plans and policies.

There are some “critical thresholds” that change the trajectory of history. The world wars were examples of such thresholds as was the dawning of the age of computers and artificial intelligence. Ethical thinking and questions on God have never been framed in the same way again after Auschwitz, and the Catholic Church has taken strident steps in paths heretofore unknown after Vatican 2. A pandemic like the coronavirus disease 2019 was — and still is —- cannot leave us unchanged. Many scientists and anthropologists had foretold that the world was ripe for the devastation of a pandemic — and the coronavirus proved them right. It would be foolhardy to ignore what we have learned because of a deleterious attachment to “the way we were.”