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Alaska Airlines Flight 1805, Los Angeles to Washington DC, March 5, 2020. So the empty spookily is the cabin, the beautiful stewardess continues to offer me excess sandwiches, not understanding that the physical splendor that fascinates you from the byline above is not compatible with white carbon. Not until I go down to a desert capital a few hours later, I absorb what is happening. The world has changed.
Then, sooner than the bulls predicted, it does not change. Urban life returned largely by 2022. Tourism is as rampant as ever. (Imagine knowing the middle-British government would support extra tracks in Heathrow AND Gatwick.) Restaurants are like Fort Knox to get inside. There are pandemic clothing – at the levels of office occupation, in public debt, in constant health problems, in disturbing memories – but the idea that you will rehabilitate the wholesale society seems strange.
Five years later, one lesson stands, and it is difficult for a journalist to admit: almost all events are effective.
In my life, the only historical point of the turn has been the fall of the Soviet Union, the election of Donald Trump and the current war in Ukraine. I would suggest the 2008 bank clash, but it seems that more and more Eurocentrics to do so. The American economy overcame that trauma, and then some. China and India continued their erection despite this. The war in Iraq, then? A fiasko, and a REGIONAL Bion for Iran, but in a way of changing the world.
After September 11, it was a common sense that religious terrorism would prevail Western strategic thinking thereafter. Who ranks now during the traditional inter-state war as a threat to life and freedom? I recall a former Koleg at the height of ISIS, saying that Britain should cut its nuclear prevention to finance special forces, intelligence and other agile resources. The argument was not just loved. In the room, it was close to the predominance. However, looking back, he and we exaggerated how much the world had changed. It takes an almost inhumane detachment to stay out of your time and to see them as transient. However, no irreversible mistakes occur. (These should not be political. The art that dates worse is often the one who strives for contemporary importance.)
Of course, “Turning Point” is a delightful phrase. Most social changes occur through gradual trends. Again, however, which of these in my life really matters? China’s growth and non-west, of course. But the digitalization of life? Without entering the Solow paradox (“You can see the computer era everywhere, but in productivity statistics”), it is not as if we are growing at unknown rhythms in the analog era. In Britain, after decades of the Liberal More, of “Relativism” and the loss of defense, the public marked the Queen’s death with the dedication she would have made in 1960. Convicted to record innovations, my profession can overcome how deep a new trend or idea penetrates.
You can go two ways here. One is to comfort yourself, in a sense “this too will pass”. But there is a gentle angle: the tension and non -involvement of almost everything. If an event as big as the pandemia did not place society in a new course, what a chance of “epidemic of loneliness”, or most of the elections, or this or the excess generated by General Mr.? Almost everyone in the public field that you are asked to devote time and think is steam. I gave a summer of my twenties in the scandal of parliamentary spending.
There were other things to get out of pandemia. People are bad predictors of their future behavior. Compare the high vaccination rates with all the rejected rejected in the surveys. Also, no one who protects cities without a car can have thought about it. Without the presence of the traffic environment, a silence and tranquility reigned that it was more medieval than pleasant. But the last lesson, with a distance of five years, must be the “climb” of human nature in the face of simple events. Many conservatives have managed to see that era as an authoritarian greeting. Those with more justice can see it as the highest justification of their worldview.
Janan.gans@ft.com
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