A clamour to return to the status quo after Covid-19 would be bad news for people and the planet, argues Richard Swift. We may never get a better chance for a new normal.
There is a 1980s song by the Canadian folk poet Bruce Cockburn that portrays a notion of an ominous threatening normality and seems to resonate with humanity’s present dilemmas particularly well:
Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage
Suddenly it’s repression, moratorium on rights
What did they think the politics of panic would invite?
Person in the street shrugs ‘Security comes first’
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse1
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