The new normal — where are we at?

THE world today is undergoing cataclysmic changes, whose ramifications we may not comprehend fully well into the next generations. What we glimpse now of our future are simply vignettes seen through the prism of current realities, already distorted these past five months by the contagion. We reach out to the past for comparative clarity yet see only instances of similar horrific plagues. The world has been ravaged from time to time and, only a century ago, the 1918 Spanish flu killed millions in its wake; and our collective consciousness refusing to accept the inevitability of analogous results — nevertheless, the Damocles’ sword hangs over our heads. Perhaps this is part of the new normal, impelled by intermittent visits of a contagion that forces a global reset.

This column focuses this time on Philippine concerns. We just have to get on with our lives with the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) among us, permeating every aspect from our behavior to our leadership’s concepts of governance. Thus, we pick up from where we left off pre-Covid-19.