In This Episode: Everyone says they want to “go back” to “normal” rather than have the constant uncertainty of the pandemic. But what “normal” do we want to “go back” to? It’s time to think about a new normal — what do we want to go to as this craziness ramps down?

068: What Normal?

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Show Notes

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* I mention episode 64, about gerrymandering. It’s The Line in the Sand.

* My sources for the various statistics include (roughly in order): U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the CDC, the Commonwealth Fund, and the CIA World Factbook.

* There’s a chart in the transcript that breaks down the $3.6 trillion.

Transcript

Welcome to Uncommon Sense, I’m Randy Cassingham.

Whatever “normal” is, this sure isn’t it. The world is crazy right now, but there are bright sides to it all. Like what? We’re not in the middle of a World War, as we were in the most deadly pandemic of the modern era. Oh, and we’re not in the most deadly pandemic of the modern era!

So many are wishing they could go back to “normal.” The problem is, what was “normal” a few months ago wasn’t actually normal: it was what we had gotten used to, even though there were a lot of bad things about that status quo.

No, we don’t actually want to go back to “normal” — really. What we actually want is to feel normal. Uncertainty is uncomfortable for most people.

Besides, there is no going back. Has humanity ever been successful at going back to an earlier “normal”? I’d argue: no. If for no other reason than six months ago, we didn’t know about a novel coronavirus or the Covid-19 disease it creates, suffocating people you know and maybe love. No one alive today can remember a time when a pandemic raced around the world and threatened everyone with death — until now. And we can’t go back to a time where we didn’t know that.

So what do we need to do to feel “normal”?

We stop looking backward. We need to look forward and design what we want our normal to look like, and then move toward that with intense deliberation.

You might say that sounds like an awful lot of work. Yeah: it absolutely is. It doesn’t take a village to create a reality, it takes an entire society. Yet as hard as that is, it’s still a lot easier than trying to go back to a “normal” that is impossible to get to.

So how do we design what we want our new normal to look like? First, we think about it. Ah,

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