After the credits | The Press

The question that must be asked is not whether we want to return to normal or even whether we should return to normal. But well: can we afford, as a species – the human species – a “return to normal”? In absolute terms, the answer is yes… provided you don’t fear becoming an endangered species.

By reading the excellent file of my colleagues Valérie Simard and Catherine Handfield about our relationship to the “return to normal”, I retained the conclusion of the historian Laurence Monnais. The pandemic should make us think not only about what the health crisis makes us regret about the past, she believes, but about what we might regret in the future. Especially if we do not profoundly change our lifestyle.

Professor Monnais wonders if we cannot, collectively, have more ambition than normality. Take advantage of the ordeal we are going through to review our way of thinking and acting, particularly with regard to climate change and social inequalities. So that the return to normal is not a “return to the past”.

This fifth wave crashed into us like a 150 km/h garbage truck on the highway. Precisely because we had come to believe that the worst was behind us. Consider the end of covid hostilities and the return of sunny days: family reunions, travel plans, etc.

Then came Omicron, like a drunk uncle in a party Christmas, and the party was ruined.

Before the fifth wave, I could not have said with certainty how many times we had reached the wave. COVID-19, which had hitherto kept its distance for the lucky ones, entered just about everyone to a degree of separation. Half of my family got COVID-19 over the holidays. Luckily without major consequences.

I’m not the only one with bad spirits. We all, to varying degrees, feel like we are reliving Groundhog Day every day. In “normal times”, especially in winter, I manage to motivate myself to work thanks to very simple objectives: the upcoming release of a film in theaters, a planned dinner in a restaurant or at a friend’s house, the preparing for a trip in the summer. I need goals, other than professional, to motivate me.

It’s all been put on hold, once again. At a time of year when we finish our working days when it is already dark. Before this weekend, it seemed to me that I had only seen the sun three times in a month, and only through the window, due to covid isolation. I didn’t swallow any vitamin D tablets or set up my light therapy lamp, out of sheer laziness. Nor did I find the energy – a euphemism for “willpower” – to go for a run in the cold and dark at night.

I find myself in an almost permanent state of lethargy, when I should shake my fleas. We should all do it. Like many people, I watched Adam McKay’s most recent film, Don’t Look Up, during the holiday season. Laziness is also watching the first thing Netflix’s algorithm offers us on its homepage.

Don’t Look Up It’s not a great film, but it’s an entertaining and effective satire, which seems to have served its purpose. By making a very large audience aware of the danger of climate change and the disastrous consequences of the nonchalance of political leaders in the face of the announced environmental catastrophe.

Experts have been warning about the effects of global warming for decades, backed by serious studies. But there’s nothing like fictional scientists and as sexy as Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in a slapstick comedy, it seems, to convince us that the time is serious. Ironically, this is staged by Adam McKay himself.

I’m just exaggerating, unfortunately. What sadly reminds us don’t look up, is that human beings need see the disaster in the face to take full measure of it and react (often too late). Some refuse to face the facts even in the face of the undeniable manifestation of the catastrophe. Hello my antivax readers…

To hope for a simple “return to normal” is to be nostalgic for a carelessness that was already ill-advised 2, 20 or even 40 years ago. Disasters aren’t just effective dramatic springboards for big-budget movies meant to entertain the masses.

I will be the millionth to name this commonplace (I almost feel an embarrassment about it): we are this garbage truck driving at 150 km/h on the climate emergency highway towards a reinforced concrete wall. The current pandemic pales in comparison to the environmental disaster we are facing and that we helped create.

Almost all scientists (99% to be precise) agree on this, even if a handful of Holocaust deniers would like us to believe that humans have nothing to do with it, that climate cycles are beyond us and that we had nothing to do with the disappearance of the dinosaurs either. Logic.

After all these years, all these studies, all these conferences and summits, there are still people who confuse climate and weather. No, just because it is -20°C on the Plains of Abraham today does not mean that global warming is a delusion and an exaggeration. It is not because there is a cold record in January, in a given place, that the average temperature observed on the whole planet does not increase in a very worrying way from year to year. Having to call him back is embarrassing, but less for me than for a Radio X host.

We comfort each other as best we can. To hold on, the experts interviewed by my colleagues remind us, we must remain optimistic. This pandemic will have an end, they say in chorus. But what awaits us after the credits? Hopefully it’s not a disaster movie.