Re:Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at...
by tathougies on Friday July 17, 2020 @03:30PM
(#23874481)
We've always 'kept on getting pandemics'. Pandemics and rampant disease and death is the normal historical state of the world. We have become accustomed to it being not the case due to the prevalence of vaccines and better medicines, but COVID is nowhere near the worst pandemic ever, nor is it even the last in living memory. Recall that the worst pandemic in terms of per-capita death is still within living memory. Pandemics are normal. There is nothing that has accelerated their emergence. This is a fantastic lie.
> 'Normal' is never coming back.
That's ridiculous. If anything, this pandemic has restored 'normal' to the world. The normal state of the world is pandemics, natural disaster, human death, etc. Only by active human society have we been able to avoid that. Modern society is so good and efficient that too many people have forgotten what's normal.
If we keep on getting pandemics (something that's been expected for a long time) the whole baseline of how society operates will be forcibly disrupted. (a baseline people can be 'left behind' on the way to: I hear talk of students missing vital academic AND SOCIAL connections, which sounds like pre-pandemic talk)
If we have even moderate economic collapse, which is inevitable with the pandemic we do have (and the other, related upheavals going on) then the destination simply will not exist. We will be flung into a Star Trek future where the existing mechanisms of human survival no longer apply. It's possible the consequences of dropping 'behind' will mean the difference between becoming wealthy through business and social connections, and literally starvation and homelessness (rather than just doing poorly and getting by). However, in those conditions, all of society collapses and the wealthy have no place to be anymore. Wealth depends upon the existence of a society that can support it.
In my opinion there is no possible benefit to pretending it's possible to go 'back to normal' in any sense, and it's on us to envision what comes next. 'Normal' is never coming back. It's already gone forever, so it's time to decide whether we want human beings to survive or not.