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A Messed Up Pandemic Road Trip
The two big components of any road trip are the destination and the journey, or more specifically what you hope to experience and achieve during the journey. Everyone stocked up on rice and toilet paper for the last minute trip, and we set off with a half tank of gas and no map. A couple months down the road it turns out nobody was at the wheel. On this coronavirus pandemic road trip, the people of the United States lack clarity on our possible destination and on the journey itself.
As much as we want to blame someone else for not taking the wheel, that’s not going to keep the car or the trip going, and we must keep going. We need to conceive of a destination because it’s pretty clear that the exact place we came from won’t exist anymore. We need to use this journey as a chance to guide ourselves toward a better destination than we were headed for when we began. The virus already proved that the status quo was hopelessly broken. It’s up to us to redefine this trip and the destination we want to reach.
The definition of success for the United States is broadly communicated currently in celebrity Instagram posts, and in news media as “getting back to normal.” This is not the correct definition of “winning” a viral pandemic, and isn’t even a worthy definition of our destination for this journey. Most media sources are recognizing that things will probably be different…
