Monday, January 18, 2021

Return to Normalcy?

 Will noon on Wednesday mark the beginning of a return to normalcy? And not just for our political lives, but everything else--shopping, entertainment, social life in general? I hope so; I think so.

Note that I say "the beginning"...I don't expect it to be like flipping a switch and all the lights come on, the engines start turning, the doors unlock. It will be more like when you start your car on a cold morning and the heater comes on--the first air that comes from the vents is cold and then slowly, over a period of ten minutes or so, it begins to warm the air. In fact, after 20 minutes or so, you'll probably have to turn down the system, because it gets too hot.

Certainly, politically, we will see the end of gridlock for the most part. While Republicans may still vote against most Democratic proposals, we will no longer have the situation of the last two years, with every bill passed by the House sitting and rotting on the desk of the Majority Leader in the Senate. That was not normal.

As for the non-political, I hope the change in atmosphere in Washington will engender a change in the rest of life--that wearing a mask will cease to be a political statement, that arguments about health restrictions will return to a debate about the science and not be a debate about "tyranny." I hope that those changes will lead to others--that more people being sensible about the restrictions will lead to more sensible restrictions (when you don't have to assume that a sizeable part of the public will not obey the rules, you can make the rules less strict).

BTW, a niggling note: Before Warren Harding used "normalcy" in his Presidential campaign, most people would have said the noun form of "normal" was "normality." "Normalcy" was a purely mathematical term, for the most part.


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