Here's what I've been saying for at least a year now.
Pretend it's the spring of 1939, and you and I are planning a trip to Europe next year. Hi friend! Anyway, we've been planning this for some time now, saving our money, working extra jobs, figuring out just how we will do it. It's going to be a great trip! We'll go to London, Paris, Rome, maybe the French Riviera, perhaps Spain. We haven't worked out all the details yet, but we can hardly wait.
Then September rolls around. Germany invades Poland and a new war breaks out. Oh, crap! We won't be going to Europe next year, but we're hopeful and optimistic that the war won't last very long, and we'll take our trip in 1941.
But the war drags on. And on. It doesn't finally end in Europe until May, 1945. The soonest we might make that postponed trip is 1946. More likely a year or two or three after. And when we finally get there, we'll see a Europe profoundly different from the one we might have seen in 1939. Nothing is the same. Nothing will ever be the same again.
And so with this pandemic. It's going to last longer than people think. I'm not about to make any predictions, other than to say longer, a lot longer. And a lot of changes will be set in place. Changes involving how we travel, how we interact with others, how we live our day to day lives. I strongly suspect that schools will be hugely changed by this. I think that the whole model of educating in classrooms will be fully re-thought. Again, I'm not going to make any predictions, other than school will be a lot different a few years down the road.
We are all in this for the long haul. Trying to pretend that things are "Back to normal" is a fool's game. There really will be a new normal down the road, and it won't look at all like normal looked in 2019.
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