I think you've buried a few interesting topics here and "new normal" is a big one. I live in NYC and am on probably my third or fourth version of "normal" in a few decades. None of the old normals were so great either.

When it comes to crossing the street, we accept an unreasonably high degree of risk even though we invest billions of dollars in enforcing extremely complex and rigid safety protocols that suck the life out of me on a daily basis yet they are "normal". And no one says the stop signs and seatbelts exist due to hand wringing and fear mongering. I'm still sitting her waiting for the bane of traffic mortality (and smog) to end, but I'm going to look both ways crossing the street until it does. People 100 years probably protested their heads off to keep cars off the road and it didn't work. The much milder Omicron variant is killing way more people than traffic. You'd be better off wearing a mask and jay walking than vice versa.

I certainly could have lived without the hand wringing and fear mongering over terrorism.

And incidentally, right on red is actually still illegal NYC.