Wrestling the old normal out the door

There is a new normal out there but that day is still to arrive. It’s dawn is not yet on the horizon.

The old normal, so much of the status quo, needs to spiral from crippled to life support. It is the one thing that needs to die and get buried.

It has taken a crisis of once a century proportions to reveal the weaknesses behind the rhetoric and the structures of this, the greatest country in the world. Greatness stands solid in the storm. Strength shows in the protection of those first and most battered by disaster. Instead the winds and waves of crisis have blown and washed away words acting as a way too fragile safety net.

Think about it. La Conner’s restaurant industry is brought to its knees. We the people are bailing them out with one take out order after another. There are not enough of us to carry the load.

In the fourth week since a public health emergency in Skagit County was declared, their pain has only increased. Santo Coyote and The Slider Cafe shuttered their doors last week. We could not sustain them.

Only COA, Nell Thorn, Oyster & Thistle, Seeds, and La Conner Pub & Eatery stand open. With Governor Jay Inslee’s Stay Home order extended to May 4th, how will they make it?

We are all struggling. The crisis has revealed our health care system to be – for the masses, the general population – a third world system. We are facing the reality that our first class healthcare system is really third rate when pushed to the limit. It is the most expensive in the world but only the best for those who can afford it, healthcare metered by payments. It is underfunded and inequitable for the general population.

It was not built to serve all of us. And now we see it was ill prepared, indeed unprepared, to withstand a national crisis where the general public needed to be served at will, pushing aside the insurance company gatekeepers.

Count the systems that have failed: Needing an employer to provide health care. Domestic and farmworkers, and now gig workers not covered by unemployment and narrow categories of who gets benefits when jobs are lost. No paid family or medical leave. Our sick leave policies are paper thin. And why is feeding the poor the function of volunteers and based on donations and grants?

The people, as a whole, have been sold a bill of goods.

The United States is only the greatest country in the world on the eve of the World Series or on Super Bowl Sunday, when everything is shiny and bright and a carnival atmosphere prevails.

But what Senator Hubert Humphrey said in 1977 has always been true: “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

We are the government. It reflects us. The present national government, do you believe it is protecting you, acting in your and your family’s interests?

Our old normal norms needing jettisoning. The idea of sending workers into their workplaces to cure the economy while sacrificing those lives must be abandoned. No more canaries in the coal mine as our forefathers for centuries were condemned to asbestos mines, coal mines, uranium mines and more, sent to work till they died.

The silver lining to this international tragedy is the very real first cracks in the old order being so obviously visible. We are all suffering, a suffering that has just begun. Sadly, the pain will get worse.

Patricia Bonacic writes about the possibility of a new normal on this page. That new normal will be built out of the ashes and rubble of the old.

There is a new normal to hope and work into existence, but we are not nearly at the point or place where we can join hands and dream and pray and sing it into reality. We will get there, but first we must carefully and conscientiously drive a stake through the heart of the old normal. We have had the blood sucked out of our families and neighbors for too many years, indeed centuries.

The long period of waiting we are in offers the opportunity to consider what is most important and reflect on the structures we need to dream into our consciousness and then build that alternative future into existence.