For readers with little time:
I reconsider the lessons which I had hoped we would learn from COVID:
We should re-evaluate what people are paid according to their importance to us as people, i.e., crossing walk guards and school bus drivers merit much more respect, and decent pay.
People who live close together, breathing the same air as many others, were profoundly endangered by COVID. There should be affordable healthier living and working environments for them.
We should reduce travel for business and pleasure, thereby warming the earth less.
We need politicians who are more interested in serving the welfare of the citizens than in just scoring points on social media.
We should reschedule our lives to be less busy, and should seek quiet more often.
We should seek physical closeness to friends and loved ones more often, for longer periods.
We learned the need for reliable income during times of unemployment, and even during employment. We should earnestly seek to establish Basic Income for all.
For those with time for a longer read:
NYT columnist David French, who writes from the perspective of a lawyer, a JAG who served in Iraq, and a religiously conservative person, writes that government officials and others who view life and work as transactions as their whole context, just do not understand people to whom principle is more important than transaction. In this regard, he compares Trump with Iran: he doesn’t understand why the regime continues rather than make a deal. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/opinion/trump-iran-ukraine-true-believers.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share.
I am accustomed, as perhaps are my readers, to think of divides between rural and urban; old and young; rich and poor; super-rich and everyone else; male and female; liberal and conservative; those who are making it in this society and economy and those who are not; traditionalists and progressives (if that’s not a proper contrast, please advise me). I am accustomed to these myriads of reasons for disagreements. But I had never contemplated transactional people vs. principled people.
Among principled people may be counted deeply religious ones, some who are fearful or resentful of what the regard as loose morality, e.g., transsexuality, homosexuality, asexuality, or of religious doctrines which they don’t hold. There also be people of more relaxed religious convictions who have no regard for the first example. Assuming that it is undesirable to be irreparably opposed one to the other, a bit of transactional attitude might be helpful. An example would be the AP story about clergy from a variety of faiths who put aside differences and jointly ministered to their communities and to their houses of worship. https://apnews.com/article/los-angeles-2025-wildfires-houses-of-worship-9b222be76036eb635a4a8f3619e8dd63. Being able to set aside some principles to work together to benefit yourself and others (the transaction) could help all involved serve their core principles (service to others as service to the Divine) better than what they could do alone.
But I understand that transactions without principles can be damaging to many. Without principles there can be no guardrails, no limits, no love or compassion expressed, nor Elon Musk’s much-feared empathy. Perhaps this is what we see in current politics and government in some places in the world.
With this in mind, I reconsider something I wrote during COVID about lessons which I hoped we might learn and apply after the pandemic. In July of 2020 I wrote of some things I’d like not to give up after COVID.
This is a good time to reconsider those matters.
We read almost daily during COVID that the environment was clearing because of the decrease of industrial activity, air travel, and ground transportation. We already knew that we must make these decreases and others (apparently we could clean the oceans within 30 years¹ in the near future), yet we were not been doing nearly enough, fast enough. Now we are being forced to achieve results in very little time.
I had hoped we would be inspired by this, and decide to build on it. Perhaps re-building the air transportation networks or the cruise lines, would be seen as a mistake. The know-how of those executives, designers, engineers, pilots and air crews, and all manner of sea-going professionals could, I urged, surely be put to other uses? The military will doubtless retain air power, and we may need to retain airlift capabilities for disaster relief and for access to otherwise remote locations. Sea cargo transport, hospital and rescue ships, and military ships will always be needed. They might be electrified. But the rest?
While it is easy to understand why business meetings in person are preferable to virtual ones (even holography), businesses can no doubt communicate on-line most of the time. Desirable also it is to see how other people live, and to physically experience different cultures and ways of living. Virtual and physical travel may help us understand others better. But perhaps if we don’t travel for business and tourism as much as we have been doing, there will be less crowding of the usual destinations such as Venice – less damage physical damage to the sites. Perhaps eliminating temporary rental lodgings where there used to be homes for locals, would be good for the communities?
Dignified employment.
Perhaps we might see ethical benefits in these changes, I wrote. Perhaps we will be moved to find less polluting ways to make things and transport them, but still have dignified employment. The concept of dignified employment is an artificial and arbitrary one, and should be reconsidered in the light of our COVID experiences.
For example, I think that one of the most important occupations in our society is to be a school crossing-walk guard. They protect our children from traffic and strangers. Another category is school bus drivers. Do we ascribe dignity to these occupations? They are part-time, low-paid, they work in terrible weather and appear for two shifts at opposite ends of the day. We should value them for protecting our children, rather than for their pay status (although that should be improved greatly), or for whether they need sophisticated and expensive qualifications. They don’t need these to do their basic jobs. They need qualities such as interest in the children’s welfare and the parents’ sense of security, and a sense that they contribute to our society’s future by taking good carte of our children. These qualities should be valued highly in our society, and paid appropriately.
Their pay should enable them to live in safe places, not so crowded as the places which exacerbated COVID transmission; not so poorly maintained that they are cold in the winter, subject to mold year-round, and too hot in the summer; too exposed to noxious and dangerous vapours from nearby industry, dumps, mining, highways, and construction. Propinquity was a major cause of COVID transmission. We should reduce crowded living areas significantly, and provide independent air exchange for each living unit, and large elevators, so that people do not breathe each others’ air.
Other providers of such basic but necessary and important services are farmers and temporary field workers, personal support workers, cooks, truckers, logistics administrators and fork-lift drivers in warehouses and storage areas, grocers, sanitation workers, water workers, public transit drivers and maintenance and cleaning people; mechanics, repair people (the Toronto Transit Commission still has an iron monger/blacksmith), and transit, rail station, and airport staff of all kinds. There are wait staff, ticket takers, janitors, and very, very important hospital and nursing home cleaners – we really needed them during COVID. Had these occupations the dignity and recognition they merit, we would easily perceive the comparative value of other occupations as well, which might lower.
All this might help us create employment outside our current categories, and we might deem serving and taking care of other people, animals, and the environment, to be at least as important as making things.
We are well on our way to ever-more automated manufacturing, but also less manufacturing. As Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, writes (Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: a New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate):
Manufacturing is a decreasing part of GDP everywhere. As it declines, most of the economies will be based on services. A decrease in manufacturing may mean a decrease in the use of energy, depending on how we do it. The transition to service economies may mean some government funding of transitions (but this goes on anyway).
Perhaps this is the time to let replaced employees broaden their visions out to new (to them) occupations which have been around a while, and embrace them and be paid respectfully for them. If our polluting industries no longer account for much employment and income for people, perhaps it will be easier to transform them to non-polluting activities.²
Perhaps seeing the almost immediate dramatic benefits of less polluting activity, will inspire us to make these and other changes.
Quiet.
Many people who were then quarantined were finding quiet in their lives. There was not so much accustomed activity; perhaps not so much to say; perhaps not so much to look at, listen to, pay attention to. This may not have been pleasant, perhaps boring, perhaps so unnatural as to be frightening. Perhaps lonely. Perhaps this was the first time in a long while that each of us had had time and opportunity to be alone with ourselves, to feel centred in our lives where and when we are at the moment, without much thought to what’s next.
There was opportunity to find good in the normality of quiet which had been commonplace many years ago: once upon a time in our western society, quiet was normal. Non-industrial work was quiet. Cities were not so crowded and noisy. Sabbaths used to require quiet for much of the day. A day of rest, it was called. These had been with us well into the noisy industrial age. We need not think of quiet as a new, radical, never-before accomplished quality. Libraries were quiet, bars were noisy. School had quiet times of learning, but also boisterous during times of physical activity. Concerts had attentive quiet. Sports events had attentive noise. There were times for quiet and times for noise, and no one expected either to be the only lifestyle.
Quiet can help us concentrate, still the heart, and still the head. It can soothe the spirit. It can revere and honour the dead and the suffering. It can raise its head, or bow its head, in respect for the great and for the loved when they arrive, and depart. We can remember by telling stories noisily and joyfully; we can remember by joining in silence.
(There can be too much quiet. I have read that when there is little external stimulus to occupy the brain, the brain, needing to prepare for threat, occupies itself by creating scenarios for the future. That is perhaps easier to do in times of quiet, though it may also spawn too much worry. But perhaps we can find the value of quiet for ourselves, just the right amount.)
Less busy.
This is related to quiet. Probably many of us felt that we had been doing too much, staying too busy, doing things we couldn’t recall, keeping our stress, multitasking, losing sleep, even losing rest. When there was less required activity because unemployment enabled less, we had time to know how we felt when less busy. We may have liked it. Not everyone would come to value quiet, and time for introspection, and time to be with our families for longer hours with no particular activities at hand. But I recall my favourite expression when in the midst of busy, demanding days: “Don’t just do something: stand there!” Counterintuitive in our times…until then. And now?
When we are not so busy exercising our conscious minds, we give our subconscious less competition for energy. That’s were our creativity occurs; that’s where we examine the events of the day and figure out how they affect our emotions, our spirits, our relationships, our feeling about ourselves. That’s where we make our important decisions. That’s where we acknowledge grief and love, loneliness, longing, frustration, eagerness, pessimism, and optimism. That’s where faith raises its quiet voice, when we’re not too busy to notice.
It would be good had we come to value the reduced busyness. We might have changed the world and not returned to such busyness.
I am sure that thoughts like these have occurred to everybody. I think we should say aloud at every possible opportunity, what we don’t want to lose; what we want changed; and what we want to keep among the many changes we experienced then. Let us remember, preserve, and perpetuate the good things.
¹https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/01/oceans-can-be-restored-to-former-glory-within-30-years-say-scientists; https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/climate-emissions-wmo-1.5540721; https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/investment-ideas/article-oil-crash-could-have-investors-eyeing-fossil-fuel-free-sustainable/
² https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-coronavirus-response-offers-chance-to-shift-direction-of-canadian/
Upon reconsidering... 