Sometimes, when you click on the headline at cnn.com, the headline of the article you are sent to is different from the headline you clicked on. For instance, this morning, on the main page:
"Can the US go back to normal now?"
And the actual article's headline:
"Wait, does this mean the pandemic is over for vaccinated people?" *
Two very different things, no? Even if the pandemic were over for vaccinated people - which is absurd, as only 35% of us are fully vaccinated, and we are still living in a world featuring death, sickness, despair, confusion and tribal divisions - that would not in any way mean that the US could go back to "normal."
You'd think an organization as huge and wealthy as CNN could hire a few people to check this kind of thing. Apparently not.
This headline choice also, of course, betrays CNN's assumptions that the post-COVID world will be exactly the same as the pre-COVID world - "normal."
I've been thinking a lot about this - how popular culture, or at least the media that reports popular culture to people like me, seems to be straining toward a vision of how it used to be. Obviously, this eliminates the possibility of learning anything about ourselves, our lives, or our world while we were suddenly cast out of our comfort zones and into a holding pattern. Do we really just want to slide back in to "normal" and not have to think about how and why anything works again?
I don't.
* - The article is about the CDC's new guidance regarding mask-wearing for fully vaccinated people.
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