We're now two weeks into Governor Baker's stay-at-home advisory, with another month (at least) ahead of no school, closed businesses, social distancing, depleted store shelves, wearing face masks and quarreling with each other about "following the rules." Some of us fear for our health and lives, and the lives of loved ones. Many of us are wearily wondering when things will "get back to normal."

But if by "normal" we mean "the status quo, exactly as things were before February," I wonder if that's really what we need. Maybe this pandemic, this massive, global event, will help us to finally, permanently change things we take for granted and thought could never be changed.

Food production, for example. Everyone jokes about people panic-buying milk, bread and eggs before a big storm (something less noticeable out here than in the cities). But since COVID-19, everyone is suddenly turning into homesteaders. So many people are baking their own bread, stores are sold out of flour and yeast, while Amazon and King Arthur are back-ordered. People are talking about canning, pickling and drying their own food. Gardening supplies and seeds are selling in record numbers. Internet posts about how to grow food from vegetable scraps (for example, sprouting potato peels to grow potatoes--yes, it can be done) are going viral. Chick suppliers are selling out the hatchings of chicks. Everyone wants a flock of backyard chickens.

This goes far beyond buying bread and milk at the store; this is a loss of trust that the store will have bread and milk to sell. Where can you order food from when every country in the world is on quarantine? And so it is that many people who never understood before are suddenly keenly aware of the fragility of our supply networks, and for the first time realize on a personal level the value of redundant local production and real self-sufficiency.

That's a "new normal" I don't want to see us lose.

Take sewing face masks, for another example. I've lost count of the number of people talking about getting out an old sewing machine, or borrowing one, or buying their first machine, and learning to sew. Rather than rail against the system, we started making face masks ourselves--by the thousands. It's only one step from that toward making other things. What happens to bad consumer habits like "fast fashion" and emptying our bulging clothes closets into landfills (with polyester fibers that never decay, ever) when we're making our own clothes?

It's very hard for one household or family to make everything it needs; that's where the overlapping redundancy comes in. No one ever really did that; even pioneer families traded and helped each other. But before around 1900, almost everyone had a kitchen garden and few chickens. We produced what we could and only purchased what we had to.

COVID-19 will change us and our society forever. Wherever we were headed before this pandemic hit, we are now pointed in a different direction once it's run its course. We're not helpless on this journey; the choices are ours to make. Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan said, "there are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew." Maybe we'll finally learn how to pilot the ship in the direction that truly works for all of us.

Inanna Arthen