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Alaska Airlines Flight 1805, Los Angeles in Washington DC, March 5, 2020. So scary empty is the cabin, the beautiful air hostess continues to offer me the excess sandwiches, not somehow making white carbohydrates. It is only when I spot in a deserted capital a few hours later, I absorb what is going on. The world has changed.
Then, faster than even the planned bulls, it has not transformed. Urban life was mainly back by 2022. Tourism is still so widespread. (Imagine knowing in the middle of the pandemic that the British government would support additional tracks in Heathrow And Gatwick.) Restaurants are like Fort Knox to enter. There are vestiges of the pandemic – in office occupancy rates, in public debt, in the current health problems, in painful memories – but the idea that it would take the company wholesale seems picturesque.
Five years later, a lesson stands out, and it is difficult for a journalist to accept: almost all events are ephemeral.
In my lifetime, the only historical turns were the fall of the Soviet Union, the election of Donald Trump and the current war in Ukraine. I would suggest the 2008 banking crash, but it seems more and more Eurocentric to do so. The American economy overcome this trauma, then some. China and India have continued their increase despite this. War in Iraq, then? A fiasco and a regional Boon for Iran, but in one way or another increasingly in the world.
After September 11, it was common sense that religious terrorism would dominate Western strategic thinking afterwards. Who now classifies it on traditional interstate war as a threat to life and freedom? I remember a former colleague at the ISIS of Islamic State, saying that Great Britain should reduce its nuclear deterrence to finance special forces, information and other agile assets. The argument was not only convincing. In the room, he was almost overwhelming. With hindsight, however, and we exaggerated how much the world had changed. It takes an almost inhuman detachment to stand outside your time and see them as transient. Do not make, however, and irreversible errors occur. (They do not need to be political. The art that dates from the worst is often what strives with contemporary relevance.)
Of course, the “turning point” is a sneaky sentence. Most social changes occur thanks to progressive trends. Again, however, which in my lifetime really counted? The rise of China and the Non-West, certainly. But the digitization of life? Without going into the solow paradox (“you can see the age of the computer everywhere but in productivity statistics”), it is not as if we grow at unknown rates in the analog era. In Great Britain, after decades of liberal morals, “relativism” and the loss of deference, the public marked the death of the queen with the devotion she would have made in 1960. Condemned to record the novelties, my profession can overestimate the depth of a new trend or an idea that enters.
You can go two ways here. One is to comfort you, in a sense “this too”. But there is a darker angle: the tenuous and the rebelliousity of almost everything. If an event as huge as the pandemic did not put society on a new course, what chance “the epidemic of loneliness”, or most of the elections, or this or this over-chronics fad? Almost everything in the public domain to which you are invited to devote time and to consider vapor. I gave a summer of my twenty to the scandal of parliamentary expenses.
There were other things to take from the pandemic. People are bad predictors of their future behavior. Compare the high vaccination rates with all the refuses that had presented themselves in the surveys. In addition, no one who advocates cities without a car can have thought about it a lot. Without the ambient presence of traffic, silence and silence reigned which was more medieval than pleasant. But the ultimate lesson, with the distance of five years, must be the “column” of human nature in the face of simple events. Many conservatives came to see this era as an authoritarian parody. They could with more justice see it as the highest justification of their vision of the world.
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