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Life After a Pandemic, Should We Go Back to Normal?
I’ve been in “stay home, stay safe,” quarantine, lockdown, self-isolation, social distancing, (or whatever term you feel like using) since about March 17 when my children’s schools closed. Being mostly cut off from social contact doesn’t bother me. I work at home, and quite frankly, I only enjoy social contact on my terms anyway.
That’s not what frightens me, though. What keeps me up at night is a case of the “what ifs.” What if life never goes back to “normal?” What if our world is forever changed? What if everything I had gotten used to throughout my life stays turned on its head? Not that all of the changes would be bad, but what would that look like?
It wouldn’t be wrong to reduce traffic and have more people work remotely. It wouldn’t be terrible to have less need for commercial buildings and high rises because less office space was needed, but what about social norms?
What if kids didn’t go back to school? They could potentially do distance learning forever, but what would that do to us? Will this virus mean that kids will never know the…
