The sun is shining as I write this, and all is OK with my world — no more family COVID cases, and no local disasters that I know of, but all is certainly not OK with the world in general.
Even in the normally peaceful Cariboo Chilcotin people are fed up and want their world to “get back to normal.” Things will never get back to the normal we knew.
For one thing, COVID isn’t going to go away just because we want it to, and however the Russian/Ukraine conflict turns out there are bound to be some unpleasant consequences. I don’t think anyone is going to win this war.
The immediate problem facing us is the rising cost of everything. Who knows how long that will last? Pensions and wages won’t go up fast enough to keep up, and the only people who will be able to maintain their normal standard of living will be the rich folks and those who make money on pandemics and wars.
Then there is the elephant in the room, climate change, and we’re in a dream world if we think that isn’t going to affect our lives, more extreme heat, floods, droughts, whatever. Of all the future woes, I believe this one is going to make the biggest impact on our normal lives forever. It’s been creeping up on us but most of us are in denial. We are a society that wants to burn our candles at both ends and we don’t think about what happens when they’re gone.
Although everything is dismal right now, if we work together, we can weather the storms. It will take some changes in our behavior, no more blaming and name calling, but we could end up with a better normal than we’ve had.
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