This article was first published on the Metta Center webpage at Waging Nonviolence.
In Wuhan, China, the Honda factory has returned to full production. People, most of them still masked, go here and there in this industrial city of 11 million, steadily resuming their normal, pre-pandemic lives. We are happy for them, but - at the same time - this is not the “normal” we want. As was seen recently on a wall in Chile: “We Won’t Go Back to Normal, Because Normal Was the Problem.” Joe Biden himself has just said, “When we come out of this, we can’t just go back to business as usual.” We have to fix what is “deeply broken” in our country.
A new society can be developed from the inspiring ways people around the world are responding to this unprecedented disaster, and this is what we should be planning right now in the spirit of Gandhi’s “practical idealism.” That is to say: We should not be expecting miracles like the president seeing the light and changing his ways, or his avid followers deciding they don’t really want to drink the Kool-Aid, or right-wing evangelical Christians getting some sense of what Jesus was talking about. Instead, we should be looking to what has spontaneously emerged from the vast reservoir of human resilience and fellow-feeling that seems to need such an emergency to call them forth.
