By the time this is published, 1 March 2021, St. David’s Day for all my Welsh and Welsh American readers out there, we will have very nearly reached the first anniversary of the beginning of the lockdown. For me, that anniversary is on 13 March, the last day that I reported to my university for normal teaching duties. It was a Friday, an unlucky Friday the 13th. I only kept my students in class for maybe 20 minutes a piece, just long enough to explain how we were going to continue the class online going forward. I said my usual “Good luck,” and “Hope to see you on the other end of this,” and that was that. The rest of the day was filled with meetings, half of which were wrapping things up that my colleagues and I had been working on, the other half planning for the uncertain future to come. 

We figured the storm would pass by Memorial Day, echoing many a voice from many a war in history, and quickly found our predictions far too brief for what would actually happen. Now, one year later, with 512,979 dead in the United States, 2.5 million or more dead globally at the time of writing this, we have seen our world forever changed by the pandemic of 2020-2021. How do we move past the past year, that annus horribilis to borrow a phrase from the Queen, and begin to live our lives again while remembering to take account for all that has happened? One thing that we absolutely should not do is try to “return to normalcy” to borrow another phrase, this time from President Harding, whose presidency a century ago was marked by scandal in ways that are painfully familiar to us now. 

A century ago, our ancestors didn’t forget the horrors and sacrifices of the Spanish Flu of 1918, but that pandemic would always be overshadowed by the four-year nightmare that was World War I. After four years of brutal war and two more years of pandemic, Americans along with the rest of humanity wanted to move on, to enjoy life again. Once this pandemic is over, we should enjoy life to the fullest, but we should never allow ourselves to forget what has happened in the last year. By now, everyone of us ought to have figured out that there is no such thing as normal in this everchanging world of ours, except of course for a town in Downstate Illinois. Saying “things will be normal again” disincentivizes us from working to better ourselves and our world.

There will be more crises to come throughout this century and into the next. More hurricanes, polar vortices, wildfires, weeks of constant thunderstorms, flooding, and tornadoes, and yes even pandemics. After millions of years of evolution and tens of thousands of years of civilization you’d think we would’ve figured out that as much as we can control our own lives, we can’t control nature. Influence it, absolutely, but we’ll never be able to control it, to keep ourselves safe from the disasters that mark our lives. The best we can do is be prepared for them, winterize our power grids, and invest in green energy among other things, to leave a stable, prosperous, and healthy world for our future to enjoy. 

The children of the 2020s will more than likely live into the 22nd century. Our dreams of a better tomorrow can be their today, but only if we do our part to make it. Let’s not allow ourselves to make today’s crises and stubborn inability to change the normal of tomorrow. We owe it to them and to ourselves. I’m not fond of dystopian fiction, it encourages pessimism and helps convince us that trying to improve things is a futile task. We should always be optimistic, after all we have the power and ability to make things better, to ensure there is a future for humanity.

Let that be the lesson of the Coronavirus Pandemic.