One day we will have this virus under control. Maybe that’s six months from now or maybe it will take longer. And when that happens we will be in a recession. Businesses are already folding and more will follow. The stock market appears to be in free fall. People will lose their jobs, their businesses, their houses. These things are already happening and they will probably get worse.
The gouvernment will try to put things back together. They will try to go back to the way things were last year. The economy will be prioritised above pretty much everything else. Back in Business will be the slogan. We will be asked to make more sacrifices to try and rebuild the world as it used to be. But should we?
It’s not just the economy that is being changed by this. People are being changed as well. In the west we no longer live in a protective bubble, sure that nothing can truly harm us. The safety net is gone. People who have never needed social aid are having to ask for it. People aren’t sure when this is going to end. We are losing our “innocence” and that is going to be the biggest change.
Going back to the way things were is impossible. The society of 2019 isn’t sitting there waiting for us to get through this, it is gone forever. We can’t go back to it, even if it was something worth going back to. We have changed and that means we aren’t going to settle for things being the way they used to be.
I don’t know what that’s going to mean. I don’t know what the world of 2021 is going to look like but I know it won’t be the same as the world of 2019. It can’t be. How can we possibly go back to cutting NHS funding when we’ve all seen how much we rely on it and the people who work in it? How can we go back to questioning a living-wage for people who work in supermarkets and as couriers when we’ve seen that we need them to keep us alive?
Things are already changing, the only question is what we want them to change into.