INDIANAPOLIS — I tried to remember the last day that felt normal. The old normal.
It was March 11. Exactly one month ago. That was the last day of this year’s session of the Indiana General Assembly. Bills were being passed, or dying, in the final minutes of the legislature. Lawmakers sat inches from each other in the chambers. Reporters sat elbow to elbow. In the hallways outside the Senate and House chambers, lobbyists huddled in bunches.
There were handshakes and close conversations. No one was wiping down anything with Purell. I remember one lawmaker rolling his eyes when someone mentioned New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had called out the National Guard in that state to help with the coronavirus epidemic.
That day, there were 1,267 coronavirus cases confirmed in the United States and 38 deaths.
As of late this week, Indiana alone had more than 6,000 cases with more than 200 deaths.
Nationwide, there were roughly half a million confirmed confirmed cases of COVID-19 — the label given this novel coronavirus — and about 15,000 deaths.
By the time you read this, all of those numbers will have grown. By the time you read this, you or I might be one of those numbers.
That is the new normal. I made my first new normal grocery venture on March 13 to find massive lines and empty bins where potatoes and bananas had been, empty shelves where toilet paper and paper towels had been. Days later when I found everything I needed on another trip — toilet paper! Clorox disinfecting wipes! — I felt the thrill of victory. I’ll never take them for granted again.
This new normal is like nothing before in most of our lives. I was too young to remember what it was like in the 1950s when polio terrified parents across the nation, who saw children awaken just fine in the morning and struggling to breathe by the afternoon.
I have only a vague memory of my mom taking my sister, brother and me to a nearby school where we joined a queue of children to get a little cup of a sugary liquid. It was the polio vaccine. Thanks to that vaccine, polio was eliminated in the United States by 1979. A polio-free America became the new normal.
Today, we know scientists are working on a vaccine for COVID-19, and we know they will succeed. The new normal, someday, will be a world where a shot wards off this virus. But that is not our normal.
Our new normal also does not compare to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Then we were shocked and grief-stricken, afraid to turn away from our TVs while longing to turn away. But when we did we could turn to each other to hug, to mourn, to cry. We didn’t know the words “social distancing.” We only knew the power of a hand to hold and a shoulder to cry on.
Flipping through Twitter and Facebook, I see the virtual gathering people do now, sharing both anger and grief with stories of optimism and triumph. We take hope from the 102-year-old woman in Italy and the 104-year-old man in Oregon. If they can survive, so can we! And then we cry as we read of the six-week-old baby who died of the virus.
Many of us know someone infected by this virus, some critically, some fatally. All of us are impacted, whether it’s seeing jobs and paychecks that once seemed secure vanish as stores and restaurants close, or seeing our retirement funds evaporate as the stock market plunges in reaction.
This is a war, and we are all soldiers. We are all casualties.
Our new normal is fighting by staying home. It is talking to friends and family via FaceTime or Skype. It is washing our hands over and over. It is taking your temperature, just in case. It is going online to learn how to make a face mask; I now can do it with a cloth napkin and stretchy hair ties. It is standing 6 feet away from the next person in line at the cashier.
Recently, someone posted that we can’t forget to stop and smell the roses. My new normal is smelling flowers — and even the cat litter — just to make sure I can, ever since I read that people infected with COVID-19 lose their sense of smell.
But I still notice the flowers. And I know someday the new normal will be smelling them for their fragrance alone.
Mary Beth Schneider is an editor with TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalists. Send comments to [email protected].
