Over the last year (2021), much has been written about returning to “normal” or accommodating to a “new normal.” Many people long for a return to a time before COVID-19 and its growing effects. Before 2020, who thought about social distancing except in terms of crossing the street to avoid a particular person you did not want to meet – a former friend with whom you had a bitter argument, a thuggish-looking man, or even a panhandler. Fist bumping was confined to teenagers, perhaps those bordering on delinquency. A person entering a bank while wearing a mask was a threat to everyone present. Waiting in a doctor’s office with only a few patients sitting on the other side of the room meant that the physician probably was not really one you wanted to see.
There was a time when one driver could express annoyance with another driver and not fear being shot as a result of their different opinions on the validity of an action. In fact, many claim there was a time when someone with a different opinion on either politics or other social issues was not automatically thought to be a demon, deserving imprisonment in an everlasting Hell.
There was also a time when children walked or were bussed to school every day. Afterwards, they might mess around at the local mall before going home to watch a current TV broadcast. According to many observers, that was the era which existed before our “new normal.” On the other hand, I now wonder if there ever was a time when events were truly “normal.”
Was it normal when our own parents were young and were concerned about the Spanish flu? Was their response with the Charleston a normal one along with the other events of the Roaring Twenties to which they wanted to return when the Great Depression arrived? Perhaps the growth of food lines and the dust bowl of the Midwest was the new normal. It was unlikely, however, that many people wanted to return to the Hoover years when FDR became president and the new normal of war in Europe and Asia occupied everyone’s lives.
Following D-Day and, shortly thereafter, in August 1945, with the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and on Nagasaki, we entered years of a new normal, the silent generation, a time when students trained to hide under their school desks, while their parents dug shelters in backyards across America. Were the years of the Cold War, the construction of the Berlin wall, and Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe-banging more normal than the new normal after Michael Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin or Vladimir Putin came into power? Did Americans prefer the normal events during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the First and Second Gulf Wars, the Afghanistan War or the invasions of Cuba or of Granada? Was the time of the Cuban Missel Crisis, albeit brief, a time for a new normal? Should incursions into Ukraine or rocket launches of North Korea become the new normal?
How many adapted to the spread of polio viruses in the new normal of the mid-forties and were reluctant, in the mid-fifties, to have either themselves or their children be injected with the Salk vaccine or require them to consume sugar cubes laced with the Sabin vaccine? In fact, when did the routine vaccination for smallpox, whooping cough, chicken pox, rubella and mumps, as well as for measles, become the new normal for children entering school? Were the years of HIV and AIDS to be longed for when the new normal of vaccines and other treatments became available?
On the social front, did the march from Selma to Montgomery Alabama usher in a new normal? Or did the assignation of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the riots in Washington, D.C. in 1968 initiate a new normal in the civil rights movement until the assignation of George Floyd began another new normal? What kind of a new normal has arisen because of the latest riot or insurrection in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021?
How does a new normal differ from a change, a significant change, in our social life? Do we attempt to change the present without really knowing what we truly want for the future and directing our efforts toward this desire?
Most humans have a tendency to fear change; they desire to maintain the status quo. They seek the normal. The problem is that the current normal may never have been normal! Although it might appear that in the Middle Ages there were decades when little really changed, when the life of one’s grandparents mirrored the life of most living peasants, this was not really the case. The Renaissance did not arrive out of nothingness. The Age of Enlightenment was preceded by another new normal when sailing ships circumnavigated the globe. The Industrial Age of steam power was the new normal until replaced by electric power. Coal was the new normal before gas, solar and wind became the latest resources desired by that Industry, an Industry of machines which has become an Industry of Service.
Change may bring about either destruction or production. Change may be for either the better or for the worse. Change can be thwarted or promoted. Change and a new normal are inevitable. There is an ancient motto: Non progredi est regredi … not to go forward is to go backward. This may be the only conclusion that never changes!