Thanks to Covid

By Julia Florian

Thanks to Covid, we now have a new normal.  Over the span of two years, we have had more protocols come out than ever before.  

First, it started off with quarantining.  Have you ever seen the movie Songbird? Would a movie like this, where everyone is scared by the government, come out if we hadn’t had our own lockdowns?  

The next protocol to make an appearance was masks.  Not surprisingly this one you can also relate to a movie, Five Feet Apart.  In this movie they also incorporate social distancing.  Can you imagine carrying a six-foot pool cue around with you every day, to make sure someone stays at a far enough distance? I sure can’t see that being normal.  

Have you ever had your parents tell you when you were a kid to make sure you wash your hands after going to the bathroom? Well now look what we’re dealing with.  These days everyone has cute little hand sanitizers in their purses, on their keychains, and around every corner you turn you will see them.  I can’t think of a specific movie that focuses on handwashing, just every doctor show ever made.  

Then the world went online.  Online learning was only used by a small percentage of people, and now everyone is familiar with it.  In Zoom calls and online classes, we can present ourselves any way we want, if you forgot to put pants on after you woke up, that’s alright no one could tell.  We can all pretend to be like Tom Cruise in Risky Business.  It seems appropriate to reference movies with these protocols because most of us in the last two years have spent a lot of time in front of screens.  I hope one day in the near future all these mandates will disappear and we can go back to what the old normal was.