Thread by @shengokai

To be bluntly Deweyan, calls to return to "normal," embodied in the elimination of masking and social distancing restrictions, demonstrate that our culture has neither grown nor learned anything from the ongoing pandemic. Instead, it simply wants to reinstitute a previous order.

To be clear: growth, for Dewey, is the integration of previous experience into the present for the sake of future action. Communication enables this individual process to take place on a cultural level, thereby allowing cultures, nations, what have you, to grow and change.

Growth happens in response to an environment as a process of inquiry. Again, on a cultural level, this requires the integration of multiple experiences of the world through culture such that we engage in collective inquiry to resolve a problematic situation.

So, when I say that our culture has not grown, and that calls to return to normal demonstrate this, what I'm saying is that our culture has learned nothing from the ways the pandemic has intensified the stark divides already present in our society.

I am saying that our culture has learned nothing from the ways that it literally threw disabled people under the bus in its pandemic response and its rush to "return to normal." Further, it has learned nothing about the character of its people through their conduct.

That is, we treat the politicization of public safety as a spectacle, and not a diagnosis of something broken in our society. We treat the ways our pandemic response failed disabled people and people of color as not worth considering in future efforts.

Moreover, it has demonstrated the fundamentally callous nature of our social priorities (and yes, this ALSO is a shot at "the left" because it is complicit) where basic human rights are concerned.

Put simply, the pandemic provided a whole host of cultural experiences across multiple institutions from which our society could have learned, could have grown, and instead we chose to ignore almost all the experience of the pandemic to rush towards a "normal."

So, for me, I don't want things to go back to "normal." For many of us, normal was an unsustainable set of conditions that we we barely survived. Normal was a hostile environment that actively resisted attempts to make it more livable.

What I want is for our society to integrate the experiences of those harmed by our pandemic response, those of us victimized by the way the pandemic intensified the fractures in our society, into our present activities for the sake of a better future, not a return to "normal."

Instead, what I'm getting is a rush to normal that is acting like a collective "forgetting" of all the suffering we endured, which is bullshit. Fuck "return to normal," build something better.