America innovates in time of need

The spirit of American adaptation and innovation never ceases to amaze me.

I was pondering this the other morning as I stood in line to get into the local Walmart, mask around my face, disposable gloves on standby, and phone at the ready to pay without touching cash or handling a credit card.

Two months earlier, the experience of shopping with so many people dressed in full-plague gear would have been equal parts depressing and surreal. Now, it’s just Wednesday.

Not only did it take the public a remarkably short time to adjust to a new normal, but it took the retail and grocery world only a few weeks to institute systems to provide services safely — plexiglass shields at checkouts, X’s along sidewalks to encourage social distancing and one-way aisles to decrease traffic.

One part of mask-wearing I hate is that people can’t see you smile. And, indeed, companies have started to manufacture transparent masks, the better to catch those nonverbals and to aid people who are deaf and read lips.

Last week, I completed a touchless pickup at a local pizza franchise. My wife called ahead and ordered, paying over the phone. When I arrived, an employee brought the order outside, placed it on the hood of my car with a canvas bag underneath, and then backed away to the safety of the sidewalk. Once I had exited the vehicle, picked up the pizza and put it into my car, he came back and retrieved the bag.

Here was a ritual that didn’t exist a few weeks earlier, and one you would be hard-pressed to explain to any time traveler visiting from the distant era of, oh, February.

As strange as this all felt, in another couple of months it will be so commonplace as to be hardly worthy of comment, much like increased security for airplane flights were so unreal in those first months after 9/11, yet today we are acclimated to taking off our shoes and opening our luggage.

Our boundless capacity for adaptation and change on full display, once again.

Even when we conquer this coronavirus and are standing at the door of a reopened economy, like John Travolta’s immuno-compromised character in “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” wiggling our collective toes at the yellow tape separating shelter-in-place with complete freedom, some concessions may have to be made.

I can envision a world where, like those ubiquitous bagcheck stations at ballparks and concert venues, screeners take ticket holders’ temperatures and ask a few basic questions: Recent fever? Cough? Shortness of breath?

It may be the price we pay for watching a double-header on a sultry July day or seeing a favorite band prance about on the stage. Someday, our kids and grandkids will marvel about a time when this didn’t happen, when sick people were encouraged to go to work and weren’t asked to leave public places.

It will also be interesting to see how many work-at-homers and learn-at-homers are allowed to continue in this fashion, even once stay-at-home directives are lifted. After all, businesses have invested in outfitting workers for remote work, so maybe that will become the new norm, or at least some hybrid version dividing time between home and office/school. (Tax preparers should expect to see a deluge of deductions for home offices next April.)

Also remaining to be seen is how the pandemic shifts America’s — and the world’s — buying habits and, more importantly, priorities. Economists speculate that some big-name retailers may not bounce back, their business eclipsed by online options and an inevitable recession. The pandemic would have only hastened the demise of some, where the writing has long been on the wall.

As for our priorities, perhaps Julio Vincent Gambuto, writing for Forge, said it best in a recent column when he urged Americans to resist gaslighting attempts by the Establishment — the potent forces of government and advertising — to convince us to return quickly to “normal.”

“Take a deep breath,” Gambuto advises, “ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullsh** and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud.”

If enough Americans do this, the revolution that follows could be the most significant adaptation and innovation of the 21st century.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter