Thursday, July 27, 2023
PMT: What the pandemic left us
It's kind of odd, the amnesia we have about the pandemic. People rarely mention it, even though it hit us only a few years ago and was (hopefully) a once-in-a-generation event. Yet, it continues to shape our society in some important ways:
1) The life of kids was severely disrupted as the usual non-family anchors of childhood-- school, church, play groups, sports, clubs-- were all shut down or severely altered. We still see serious lags in educational attainment (with troubling racial disparities), and the prevalence right now of juvenile crime is, I suspect, deeply related to these disruptions.
2) Downtown areas around the country are decimated by the shift to work-at-home necessitated by the pandemic. Empty office buildings lead to other key businesses failing, and we are losing the physical center of our communities.
3) People don't trust public health experts, and that could be catastrophic when the next public health crisis hits-- and it will.
4) I get the sense that we are not close to being back to the way we were in terms of seeing and being around one another, which is the essence of a society.
Some of these issues have to have political responses, yet I rarely see them discussed in political debates. Sure, people rehash their views on responses to the pandemic, but that doesn't address the problems we have right now because of the Covid crisis, and that is a serious failing.
