What can we expect after the pandemic?

Growing up in Saskatchewan, I always admired my grandparents’ ability to cope with whatever life presented them. They were children during the Great War and the Spanish Flu who grew up during the Great Depression. They met and started a family before and during the Second World War.

My grandfather fixed cars all his life while my grandmother stayed at home and raised three children.

My grandparents took my family in more than once while I was growing up. My father died when I was two or three years old, and my Mom had a tough time raising my two sisters and me. There would be six of us living in a house that wasn’t even a thousand square feet. I never heard either of my grandparents complain, and we never felt unwelcome.

My grandfather was a hard man in a lot of ways. He didn’t talk to me as much as he would look at me. He had a soft spot for my sisters, especially my younger one. But for me, it was mostly simple, forceful commands and a lot of silence. When I was little, I did not understand his lack of warmth, so I was afraid of him. As I grew up and got to know him, that changed. I ended up having more respect for him than anyone else since.

He died when I was eighteen years old. He had Parkinson’s disease and probably lived a lot longer than he wanted to. I believe he did it so he could be with my grandmother. She followed him a year later in that way that old-people sometimes do. She was healthy until he died, then that was it. It’s hard to believe, but that happened thirty years ago.

My grandparents and most people that I met from their generation were resilient. They grew up surrounded by hardship and constant tension. This experience gave people from their era the psychological ability to take on any crisis. I don’t know what went on in their minds; I only know how they acted.

My grandparents met difficult situations with pragmatic solutions. They didn’t let negative emotions caused by the crisis hinder their resolve to meet the challenge. They were dependable. Not just for a hot meal when we needed it, but my grandmother was kind and loving. Their home was welcoming.

My mother’s life tells a different tale. She was born during the Second World War, arguably a part of the Baby Boomers. Her father had stable employment for her entire life. Her mother stayed at home and raised her and her two siblings. She went to university and became a nurse. She served in the army for a while and, I believe, was an officer. It was there that she met my father. They were married and had three children, all very close together in age. Shortly after my younger sister was born, my father passed away due to cancer.

In case you are expecting this to be the part of the story where my mother became resilient, then I must disappoint you. She never did. She learned to rely on others. She would endure long bouts of poverty with only the occasional light at the end of the tunnel. Things always had a habit of not working out. There was invariably someone who would assist her with whatever the crisis was. Often it was her parents, my grandparents.

My mother met difficult situations with impractical or unrealistic solutions. Challenges resulted in anger, or depression, or anxiety; there was constant negative emotion .

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. Martin Luther King Jr.

Moving on, Millennials are a mixed bag, I think. They are hard to nail down. I won’t take the space here, or the time, to argue whether they were a resilient group of people before this year’s events. I am sure some Millennials were already resilient. I think it is popular to generalize them as a group of people who are not. Who knows really?

I believe 2020 is going to make society more resilient. It is going to be led by the largest demographic, the Millennials. Young people are not fighting a war, but they are facing multiple crises. Job losses, mounting debt, isolation, fear, intolerance, and all this crazy shit that is going on will make its mark. One day it will end. Whatever the “new normal” is will take over.

When disadvantaged groups are studied, not everyone becomes resilient. It is not unusual for people to suffer badly after trauma. Drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide and other destructive behaviours emerge. We see this happening now.

However, when societies go through times of great difficulty, increased resilience emerges. If this means that after all of this, we will have more people with pragmatism, then hooray. We need this to happen. We need it in our daily lives, we need it in our leaders, and we need it in our institutions.

When the sun finally sets on the COVID-19 pandemic, the world could be a much better place. It will be a long time before people sit down to write the definitive history of our time. I hope when they do, they write the story of a world full of resilient people that bring society back from a dark place.

That would be so sweet, man.

J. David