Warning: this could get pretty depressing, so don't read if you're already in a bad state.
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Throughout the pandemic we've seen one talking point, one message, keep surging throughout discourse. "When we return to normal." "When it's all over."
People want hope, and they are fed hope by this messaging that the pandemic is a temporary situation, and that you just need to keep holding on until it somehow, magically, ends.
This messaging has actually been common even before the pandemic. Donald Trump's run for presidency and success was completely unprecedented and turned the world on its head. The media, both news and social, made him seem like a joke, and amplified a different unbelievable story every day. And it got attention, and it was popular, and it was good for the news.
It always seemed like the world was calm until Trump, who turned it upside down. And with presidential term limits being a thing, Trump was always temporary. He was just a temporary change from the normal. And if not after 4 years, then after 8 years, he'd be gone and forgotten and we'd be back to a normal world with a normal news cycle in which credulous things happened and everyone could stop worrying again.
But the news won't let this happen.
Donald Trump has created an incredible opportunity for the news. He's created a new news cycle, a new hot topic, a new must-read, every single day. He's given the news more attention, more reads, more clicks and more money than they could ever ask for.
The news isn't going to let that attention go away.
Donald Trump is temporary, and will be eventually gone one way or another. But the old normal is gone forever.
Covid-19 is not going to go away without either incredible government policy change, or a vaccine. The first one will never happen. The second one will not happen within the next several months. There is no reason for things to return to normal before then. They will only keep getting worse.
Even if Covid-19 vanished 5 minutes after I post this, even if it just disappeared from every infected person and they recovered, it would not be a return to normal. There would still be massive fear and conspiracy, driven by the media. There would still be orange man. There would still be the ruined economy, whatever that means. There would still be massive unemployment. There would still be millions failing to make rent.
The end of Covid and the end of Trump will not be a return to normal. There are too many forces preventing that from happening.
Get used to the world now, because it's here to stay this way.
The "normal" was also garbage and has been even more garbage than now. Even like just 10 years ago. Did we all forget the iraq war...? That was "normal" and it was worse than anything under the Trump admin.
The "sense of normalcy" is really just an ideological fume state wherein, due to relative prosperity for a certain type of person in America, you can ignore everything deeply fucked up about the world. The difference now is that this prosperity is beginning to be challenged. In other words material conditions have changed such that it makes previously comfortable libs feel like they can ignore everything and now instead of going to brunch 4 times a week they have to constantly reckon with how bad things are for their kids who are constantly a couple hundred bucks away from being homeless.
That's all fine and good, but the real danger is that insecurity being channeled in a direction that frankly this country has been exceptional at channeling it to, ie fascism.
Yeah, you nailed it.