I hate to return to that kind of normality ...

It’s a constant theme in written and electronic media during this coronavirus pandemic — God, I can’t wait until we can return to “normal.”

But for me, this scary virus has opened up a window into the slimy awfulness of the world we have allowed — and too many of us have abetted — to come into being.

America’s real problem isn’t the virus, nor even certain corrupt and malicious guys in the White House, but the cesspool from which both sprang.

Before this pandemic, an amazing number of us had persuaded ourselves that we were doing OK, managing to navigate the rising waters of expensive health care, minimal wages and shrinking benefits.

If we weren’t skimming happily over the surface like the rich in their yachts, we were at least “keeping up” by swimming through, or so at least we told ourselves.

But we now have an opportunity to really see — if we dare look at — what has been revealed: complete lack of planning to anticipate such an epidemic, an unconscionable depletion of medical supplies and resources, the disproportionate impact this is having on the poor, the already sick, the aged and minorities, the horrific lack of empathy toward the poor and struggling, and the bubbling, no longer repressed hatreds directed at those regarded as “others” by the hard-core Right.

This is what has too long been regarded as “normal,” and it is not the kind of normality I have any wish to return to, let alone perpetuate.

We are going to have to shake our collective — and individual — heads hard if we are to free ourselves of the false curtain called “reality” that has been carefully and consistently woven over us over the past 50 years by the false prophets of excessive individualism, laissez-faire capitalism and the unlimited right to accrue wealth.

This pandemic has shown us that — despite all the lies and garbage strewn about us by the Right — we live and die together.

We are not isolated islands, with laws unto ourselves; we do not bring ourselves into the world, educate, house and feed ourselves, even if we now pretend to strut about as idiots in pretending that we are masters of our own fate.

Affordable health care for all?

True richness is not found in what we possess or think we control but, rather, in the complex web of relationships that has surrounded us from our birth, those who love, nurture, and provide for us in myriad ways: parents, teachers, doctors, plumbers, carpenters, firefighters, nurses, ambulance drivers, and on and on and on.

For far too long we have turned our eyes and consciences away from the question of how others are doing. In the process, we have allowed the wealth of our communities to wither and diminish. Fast food workers and small farmers struggle to give us inexpensive food. What business is it of mine whether they draw a sustainable wage? If they have to work two jobs to make ends meet, so what? America’s all about hard work! And if small farmers can’t make it, tough! Bigger and better, that’s our creed!

Affordable health care for all? That’s not the American way! If you don’t make enough, you’re either lazy or stupid! Better yourself! Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, just like I did!

Gov’munt’s the problem, not the solution! Taxes are too high already!

Who needs public lands, transportation, parks, libraries? I don’t! I’ve got what I need!

The pandemic hasn’t made us sick.

We have long been in a much darker place for which, alas, there may be no cure, no vaccine, no light at the end of the tunnel.

We Americans call that place NORMAL.

Greg Cusack is a retired US congressman from Iowa. He now lives in Oregon. The views expressed are his own.