SAWANT: Our 'new normal' creates opportunity to embrace change
Column: Sincerely Rue
In the forever-changed, uncertain climate we find ourselves in right now, with vaccine rates climbing, people are starting to grasp for pre-pandemic normalcy.
Restaurants are opening their doors to serve patrons indoors. Universities are repopulating campuses and residence halls. People are taking flights across the country and the world in large numbers again. Concerts and sporting events are hosting spectator numbers in the hundreds of thousands.
But regardless of whether we like it, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has changed us and the world we live in for the long term.
The pandemic was a mentally and physically demanding period for everyone. We, the social creatures we are, were shut away from each other within the four walls of our homes.
Schools shifted to an online format, creating a detrimental distance between learning resources and the students that needed them. Many lost their jobs and scrambled to put food on the table, while others, deemed essential workers, were wrung dry from being worked to the bone.
“Our new normal.” We exchanged those words like a mantra as we sat in perfect tiny boxes on each other’s screens, laughing, but the joke was not funny at all.
Even though we embraced this “new normal,” it seems as if the world is abandoning it as quickly as it was bestowed upon us to revert to pre-pandemic times.
One year is a long time, and people are forever changed. For some, it may feel unnatural to revert to “normal” as though nothing ever happened, even if it is all we wanted when we were stuck at home.
There is a rude realization — when we finally have a chance to pick up the pieces of our past lives once again — that these pieces might not fit the way they used to before we were shut up in our homes indefinitely.
For one thing, the pandemic exposed systemic flaws within our country that have been and continue to affect people's lives in the long term.
Skyrocketing healthcare costs coupled with low medical capacity, high rates of uninsured residents and high out-of-pocket expenses left many Americans vulnerable and with mounds of debt.
The COVID-19 testing administration was mediocre at best, and the federal government’s response when the pandemic was at its peak left much to be desired. It was clear that nothing adequately prepared America for the pandemic.
During the height of the pandemic, adults in the U.S. struggled with mental health conditions at a higher level than pre-pandemic times. Young adults, racial minorities, essential workers and unpaid workers reported disproportionately worse mental health and substance use issues, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Additionally, racial and ethnic minority groups were disproportionately represented among COVID-19 cases. Reported case percentages for racial and ethnic minority groups were larger than the percentage of their total populations within the U.S. population.
Thus, the push to revert to a model of the country where these problems hid in plain sight, letting people suffer in conditions that made America's response to the pandemic so poor in the first place, is delusional.
It benefits very few people. Forced to face the horror that the American system’s inequity fosters, no one can claim “out of sight, out of mind” — not anymore.
The expectation that companies, educational institutions and people themselves have to urge others and the world itself to go back to operating as they did before the pandemic as if nothing happened is unrealistic. Our brains and our bodies are still dealing with the impact of it all.
Experts have classified the pandemic as a traumatic event. Children, teenagers and adults experienced post-traumatic stress disorder, which means that the psychological (and for some, the physical) impact of the COVID-19 pandemic could remain long after the pandemic is under control.
Such implies that we must allow ourselves to digest what we have been through. If the mental health conditions created or worsened by the pandemic are left untreated, they can lead to lasting psychological and physical impacts. Forcing normalcy at a pace the world is uncomfortable with can have detrimental consequences to individuals.
Going “back to normal” is such a vague and unclear thing, especially since there is no clear end to the pandemic. There is no fairy-tale-esque “the end” scribbled in starlight across the night sky. There is no finish line to run past. How can you force the end of something that you cannot even measure the finish of?
The fact of the matter is that people are going out again, returning to school, returning to the office, going out with friends and visiting family. It is an exciting time to get some semblance of pre-pandemic life back.
But we should not experience it without considering that the life we are now living is not the same one we lived before the world shut down. We cannot force a return to “normalcy” when so much has changed — when we have changed so much.
We may mistake life after the pandemic and what normalcy will eventually be as unfavorable, but this change does not have to be a crummy one. It could actually be much better. We will never know, though, if we remain so married to the version of life we lived before the pandemic.
Rujuta Sawant is a Rutgers Business School sophomore majoring in business analytics and information technology and minoring in political science. Her column, "Sincerely Rue," runs on alternate Mondays.
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