I was flipping through the
TV shows the past few days. Different kinds of shows.
Police procedurals.
Hospital dramas.
Sitcoms.
They all take place in an
alternate reality to ours now. One where people walk the streets as if nothing is wrong. No
masks. No
caution, no
distancing.
Dining in
restaurants. Going to
malls. A reality where the doctors and nurses in the big-city hospitals are mostly concerned with some odd new
surgery to be performed or the like, with no especial rush of
patients
coughing and
gasping and needing a
ventilator to keep breathing through the night at all.
Even the doctors weren't wearing masks, when they visited patients in their rooms, and sat
bedside, much closer than six feet.
Do these images remind people what normal was, a normal we'll never quite get back to? Or do they
trick some into thinking this is what normal
is, or at least can be, if all those pesky levels and layers of
government would simply lift their pesky orders and let everybody
pretend as though nobody was coughing and gasping and dying after all.