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**MAY 10, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

Back From Hell

****

Last week, my wife and I, having both been vaccinated, decided it was
prudent to resume having maskless dinners with vaccinated dear friends.
I assume something similar is going on this spring all over America.

Let's pause to mark the moment. There will be no official "end" to the
pandemic, like V-E Day or the Berlin Wall coming down. But this is as
close as it will get.

We've now had meals with three sets of good friends, and the
experience is much more moving than I would have anticipated. We have
returned from purgatory to something intensely joyous and exuberant.

The conversation feels richer and more vivid; the food tastes better. I
have more appreciation for these good people. It's as if we are living
in color again, rather than in black and white, like the scene when
Dorothy lands in Oz.

If I were a stoner, I might say it feels like being on some kind of
performance-enhancing drug. But the experience itself is a sufficient
high. Even getting a haircut, or going to the dentist for the first time
in 15 months, is a high.

It makes us appreciate how much we had missed when we were in bunker
mode: just seeing people, movies, shows, shopping, having restaurant
meals-the humdrum stuff of daily life that seems so ordinary and
unremarkable until it is snatched away. Being with family again.

We were relatively fortunate in the pandemic. I mostly work at home
anyway. My wife and I don't mind teaching on Zoom (though God knows
enough is enough). We have no small kids at home. So our enforced
confinement was not all that stressful, most of all because we like each
other's company.

Still, this really does feel like a reprieve from hell. Resolution: Now
that quasi-normal is back, let's take time to appreciate all of it,
especially the people.

After all, even if the pandemic is truly subsiding, the reprieve is
temporary. None of us gets out of here alive.

And, since this is

**The American Prospect** and not

**The American Existentialist**, there are political implications-and
an eerie parallel. We can appreciate having a normal government back,
knowing that a normal democracy is not back. Let's resolve to cherish
and defend democracy as dearly as we cherish our restored domestic
tranquility.

Here is one more resolution: The pandemic is far from over in the rest
of the world. As humans, we need to do everything in our power to make
vaccinations universal.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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