Day 14.

Our idiot-in-chief, having acknowledged the reality of the coronavirus too late now seems poised to declare victory over it too early, convinced the economy will rise like Jesus—on Easter and everything. Putting aside the obvious stupidity of this notion and saying absolutely nothing about the unthinkable damage it would do to human health and how it would not boost the economy but instead drag the economic pain out longer and longer, as more and more people get sick, stop working, and continue to overwhelm the healthcare system that is already poorly equipped to handle the tsunami of illness that is only now gathering momentum.

So, maybe I didn’t quite leave it alone. How could you not? Anyway, my purpose today isn’t to rail against the profound and appalling shortsightedness of our so-called leader. I’d like to point out how normal this new normal has become. And how flipping the switch back to “on” in a couple of weeks will not snap us back to where we were. There is no going back. The world has changed forever.

Even if Trump were right and the brief amount of time we’ve all been isolated was enough to get ahead of the virus, to equip the medical staff and their hospitals, to test enough people to know who had it and who didn’t (all of which, it bears repeating, is definitely not the case), the landscape of our cities, our work, our habits and our lifestyles has been altered and will stay with us in big or small ways even after this dust settles. We will not go back to blithely gripping the poles on the subway. Masks, I’ll bet,will become a regular face accessory for the foreseeable future. Purell in every bag. No one will ever feel guilty again about working from home. Some may be learning that cooking is actually pretty great and won’t necessarily be returning to their place as Seamless’s #1 fan. Sadly, a ton of favorite bars, restaurants, indie businesses of all kinds, from pet stores to bookstores to art supply stores to cafes, salons, boutiques, will not survive the prolonged lack of humans to do business with—and will, eventually, be replaced with other businesses. Some will be terrible and not nearly up to the par of whatever they replaced, some may improve on what was there before. Doesn’t matter right now, because the point is that we are never going back to how things were in our towns, our cities, our country just a month ago.

So, Trump discussing “reopening” the economy to get America back to business begins with the magical thinking that anything is capable of going back to “normal.”

This is normal now. What we’re all doing and not doing—it’s now normal, in all of its alarming, sad, weird abnormality.

Singing happy birthday to your hands multiple times a day. Normal. Who knew?

Not hugging your friends, no matter how upset or sad or worried they are. Partly because they’re on the video call and not in the room. Partly because we don’t know who’s carrying COVID around with them. Normal.

Getting cheeky with your Zoom backgrounds, because anything for a chuckle. Normal forever now.

Crossing the street or walking in the gutter to keep the necessary six feet between you and any other human. Maybe normal for some before, but definitely normal for everyone now.

Massive hour-to-hour swings between crippling anxiety and FUCK-THIS-IS-SO-WEIRD manic glee. This was formerly reserved for people suffering from mood disorders. Now, it’s all of us.

Healthcare workers’ chapped, exhausted faces on social media, coming off nine or ten or twelve or sixteen hour shifts trying to care for the unimaginable influx of desperately sick people. All of them begging us to help them out by just staying the fuck home. We can only hope this won’t become so normal that it ceases to shame us into actually staying home.

Birthdays celebrated via video chat. Normal.

Have you ever had so much toilet paper in your house all at once in your life? Normal now.

Not being able to find the most basic cleaning products literally anywhere: normal. Ditto hand sanitizer.

People picking up odd new hobbies or wearing Halloween costumes in March, cutting their own bangs (against all advice) and countless other odd, funny, weird, resourceful things…. Normal.

Some of this normal I think we’ll be happy to keep. Some of it, jesus, it can’t go away soon enough.

But regardless, there is no reset button. There is no going back. Especially if we attempt to do it so soon. And even if we did, even if (IF) it worked (it wouldn’t), it would go down in history that America sacrificed however many hundreds of thousands of lives or more...for the stock market.

I have every faith that America will come back from this. But not the way the apocalypse Cheetoh is talking about it. That is the wrong path. That would be the path to destruction, deeper recession and uncertainty, more fear, more death, more division, more mistrust, and the truly the irrevocable loss of our national soul.

Let’s not be assholes, America. It’s really that simple. Stay home. Flatten the curve. Wash your fucking hands. It’s easy.

It’s NORMAL.