As the costs of the virus rise, looking back may help us move forward

“We will remember a time when the world was quiet,” starts an ad for something I can no longer remember. It doesn’t seem too important—it’s possible it’s one of the new travel ads that have started back up. Maybe it’s health insurance.

“Quiet” doesn’t seem quite appropriate, but nothing else gets close. Since the coronavirus outbreak in the United States in March, many people wonder when it will end, and when things will go back to normal. The good news? Things probably won’t.

It’s nothing controversial to say the pandemic has been a disaster. We’ve had almost 100,000 small businesses have closed permanently across the US (CNBC), the highest unemploy- ment rate since the Great Depression (Bureau of Labor) and over 200,000 people have died in the US alone (CDC). In part because of a slow fed- eral response, in part because of ram- pant misinformation, and in part be- cause of general American insistence on normalcy, the pandemic has caused extraordinary damage to all areas of our lives—including taking those of some of our friends and family.

Is there a silver lining? It feels incredibly heartless to say so. I would like to make it clear that no one should have died from the pandemic, and I do not believe any death was necessary.

However, I do believe some amount of damage to the economy and morality of this country was necessary, and I say this with full acknowledgement of the position of privilege I am in. As an upper middle-class citizen, I have not had to make too many sacrifices while many others have lost employment, housing, savings, or other necessities. But this only further backs my point. One which many of us in privilege were slow to realize.

The system doesn’t work. COVID has made that clear. Our healthcare workers were unprepared, our econ- omy dropped hundreds of points and is only now beginning to recover, and the lack of basic testing and affordable healthcare has allowed the death toll to sky rocket.

Even at Wofford, in our own economically secure little bubble, we still have to wear masks, avoid parties, cancel study abroad programs and work our way around the new class schedule. Morale is low. This is common on many college campuses across the US. While these seem like minor inconveniences to what others may be going through, all we want is to make things “normal” again.

We’ve become obsessed with how things were. The summer heat has just started to pass, and with it we want our world to slip back into its old ways, regardless of what the price was then. For a lot of us at Wofford, that price was nothing.

The virus has made us face some hard hitting realities about class, economic status and social structure that we cannot go back to ignoring. It would be the same as watching a bridge crack and rebuilding the supports the exact same way. If we continue to idolize the old normal, we will surely face a disaster like this again.

Summer was quiet. We locked ourselves up in air conditioned rooms, went to the private beaches, supported change from a distance, and waited for it all to be over.

Now I walk around campus—on occasion—and it’s still quiet. I want more than anything for there to be noise, but I remember how much that noise drowned out the problems our generation will have to face, how easy it was to say “normal” and forget the people who were lost everyday to that system.

But people are turning away from the quiet. Across the nation voices that have been so long silent are being heard, not as giant engines for normalcy, but as little steps towards change, the new future, like pebbles pelted against the window. There are so many. Hear them coming.