Lasting and lagging legacies of lockdown

Opinion

Remember when we used to say “nature is healing”?

It was an early pandemic meme about how the natural world was thriving with humans in lockdown. Birdsong in the cities! Fresh air! Dolphins in the canals of Venice! (OK, that last one never happened).

“Nature is healing” became shorthand for a return to the natural order of things. Everything in its place.

Dolphins may never have “returned” to the canals of Venice, but I know nature is healing because Roll Up the Rim cups have returned to Tim Hortons.

The coffee chain took its popular annual contest online in 2020 because the company realized that making staff handle the coffee-and-saliva-moistened rims of disposable coffee cups that have been rolled up by fingernails and possibly teeth of varying degrees of uncleanliness is not only very gross but also possibly a health hazard.

But because the tactile act of rolling up a rim to see if you won a cruller or not is a national pastime fundamental to our identities as Canadians — I love this country — Timmies brought back the cups this year, in addition to the digital contest.

Five years after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, it’s hard not to see some post-pandemic symbolism in that coffee cup.

The world changed in March 2020, and it’s been fascinating to see what changes have stuck — and what changes have not. No masks in ERs but, by all means, let’s keep QR-code menus.

People blow out birthday candles again. I’ve shaken hands with people despite having vowed not to ever again. A lot of the virtual programming that allowed disabled and immunocompromised people to participate in culture without entering a theatre has fallen by the wayside. We don’t really test for the virus anymore, and vaccine uptake has dropped off.

There have been some small gains on flex and work-from-home policies, with many return-to-office edicts handed down years ago amid scaremongering about “quit quitting” and “the great resignation” and “quitagion” (we did love a portmanteau during the pandemic — quarantini, anyone?).

Curbside pickup is here to stay. So are Zoom meetings. It seems as if the pandemic successfully abolished cash — I have been trying to spend the $20 bill in my wallet for months! — and high heels (a sociologist in Maryland saw the numbers of high-heel related injuries drop precipitously in 2020, and the rise of athleisure has lowered the profiles of shoes).

The pandemic failed to normalize, say, “masking when sick” at the level many people thought it might. But it did put ventilation and air quality at the forefront, and it does seem, anecdotally at least, that people are much more willing to stay home or cancel plans when sick — the cacophony of coughing at the ballet last week notwithstanding.

Generally, five years on, there’s an air of “we don’t have to do this anymore” — an attitude that, troublingly, is bleeding into other spheres of life, such as the rollback of diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives, which became a major focus after the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

I think it’s instructive to not use the acronym DEI, so that we can clearly see what Trump and his coterie of billionaires are opposing and, in Trump’s case, blaming plane crashes on.

Five years is a long time, but it’s also no time at all, really, in the grand scheme. The pandemic changed our relationship to time; I know my memories from its early days are already becoming smudged and blurry. Maybe the lasting legacies of COVID are not yet legible and won’t be until the next one.

I am curious to see how the pandemic will start showing up in art over the next few years and decades, how authors and painters and historians and screenwriters will make sense of it. Of course, it already has shown up in these spaces; in 2022, I wrote a newsletter about the idea of pandemic content or PanCon, and the messy, almost unintentional way COVID-19 was shoehorned into TV shows and books.

I didn’t like PanCon at that time because we were too close to it, too inside it, to be able to take a meaningful appraisal of how it changed our lives, only how it was constantly upending them.

COVID-19 storylines were abandoned in ways we couldn’t abandon them; TV shows could just move on. We couldn’t. Now I’m looking forward to reading the inevitable coronavirus historical fiction and screaming about all they got wrong.

But there are little vestiges of the pandemic everywhere. Faded social-distancing decals. Hand-sanitizer pumps. Tim Hortons staff members don’t touch your cup rim; you show them and then drop it into a box.

We’ve figured out that much.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com