The changes to our society caused by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down our lives for longer than a year, continue to reverberate.
Public school students appear to have suffered losses considered so great that there is no coming back.
This is evidenced by so many school teachers dropping out of the public school education field, and the need for so many teachers at a time of crying need.
The pandemic ruined the school lives of millions of children across the nation and the world.
Taken away from them were activities, socialization programs and even public and well attended graduations.
Teaching, for many months, was accomplished, if you want to call it that, by zoom or on computers and smaller laptops – hardly the best solution to the problem of moving on during a time when nearly everything public about our lives was shut down.
Nothing replaces the teacher doing their things inside a classroom where everyone can presumably learn in person, every day for years until successful graduation.
Our lives were turned upside down by the pandemic.
It ruined the movie theater industry, and for a while, and in a big way, the restaurant industry, which is still paying a high price for the shut down and might never come back to what it was before the pandemic.
Our hospital system and health care delivery systems have been pushed to strain and near collapse by the added measures needed to contain the effects of the pandemic.
Even how we buried the dead or conducted funerals, sporting events, and how we banked…it has all undergone a dramatic and radical change.
There was life before the pandemic and there are vastly changed lives after the pandemic.
The questions that arose about the system under which we rule ourselves were prescient – that is – do we get vaccinated? Do we refuse vaccinations? Are vaccinations needed? Are they a government plot to ruin our lives?
How we interact changed dramatically.
We have still not completely come out of it.
The extraordinary changes caused by the pandemic remain. Tens of thousands of businesses disappeared in a matter of months.
Millions of us lived our lives away from others for so long that some of that has been institutionalized as a new way of life.
Of this, we are certain.
We have not experienced the end of the pandemic’s capacity to change how we live our lives.
The effects linger, especially among the kids whose lives were stunted by the pandemic, who missed graduations and years of study, who turned to zoom sessions and laptops to be taught at a distance during a historic moment when everything virtually stopped for our society.