Wake up; we are not returning to normal anything. Amongst our leadership, we have a fatal complacency that is not allowing them to act in the country’s best interest; they are afraid and paralyzed. Nobody wants to call out our president, federal or local officials, or our business leaders for their failure to do something, anything. We leave it to the same old talking heads on the same old news media outlets as though Americans have lost their voice. The same voices on the right are still blaming the left while the drama of squabbles appears to be Nero’s fiddle. The world is on fire, and we don’t have a bucket to help douse the flames.

We just want tomorrow to be yesterday so we can get on with our lives as though nothing happened. That’s NOT going to be the way it is.

At least in Europe, they are already recognizing that streets are going to be repurposed for bicycle and pedestrian traffic. Without airplanes working, there’s a great rail network that will still get people around the continent. Even if we were to add to our rail service, it would be decades before we could overcome the bureaucracy and failure in vision to give us a working high-speed system that would whisk us across America. Any spare commercial space over there can easily be converted to residential space, as there’s always the need for that. But what is New York City going to do with all of its high rises?

So here we are, and we know full well that it’ll be years before air travel returns to what it was. We know that this will impact hotels, restaurants, other services, and elements of the gig economy. Real estate will take a hit if too much commercial space becomes available due to more people working from home. More of us working from home means we lose a lot of the reason behind owning a car; even in Arizona, we could rely more and more on a bike or delivery. High contact crowded workspaces will operate how? I’m referring to meat processing, in particular; I’m guessing we’ll see robots in that space sooner than later. Sporting events? Ha. Then the really big question, what about school?

School cannot be the same for at least a good while unless a vaccine is found, but then everything changes with that. Meanwhile, New York is seeing kids with something akin to Kawasaki Syndrome that appears to be coming from COVID-19. Even if we insist that kids return to the classroom, we exponentially increase the risk of killing their parents and creating those social issues. Then, if we do figure out social distancing and, temperature checks and proper hygiene for students, there will be the issue of allowing children to participate in sports such as basketball, football, and baseball. If high school and college sports are upended, where would the pros recruit players from?

When real estate, sports, travel, transportation, education, and cultural sharing are all set off-kilter, we have a looming crisis that is going to require imagination that pushes hard into a new vision. Our current political and business leadership has FAILED us in that department, and yet they will be who society turns to as the masses are afraid of the unknown, and they are about to learn just how primitive we are. Leaving us all in lockdown would have been the smart thing to do as at least then we were waiting for the return of normal but by leaving that cocoon, we are accelerating the masses, seeing just how unprepared we are for our new lives.

Sure, to me, it’s all quite easy because I’m an uneducated idiot unschooled in the fine art of political waffling, but I certainly have ideas of how to address most of it.

First and foremost is education; we must enhance our online education to embody virtual reality learning in order to maintain social gatherings. Within that virtual space, or maybe with some type of augmented reality goggles, we could even create new online group sports. To build this virtual world, we’d have to employ hundreds of thousands to build and decorate such a world, make books, lessons, and props, and create the mechanics and physics of how things work in a world meant for education instead of shooting.

Commercial real estate will either be converted into residences, though working with high-rise buildings might never really work again when elevators are dangerous places to contract a virus, so maybe we would have to mothball them. The problem is that we have scavengers and hooligans who would see this as an opportunity to steal, deface, and burn these properties in a society that sees this kind of anarchy as “giving it to the man.” Tear them down? That might be the alternative.

Travel could be made better with a combination of rail, car, and bicycles, with the added benefit that walking and bicycling are good defenses against diabetes and heart disease, two comorbidities that contribute to fatal outcomes for those who become sick with COVID-19. If we can materialize $5 trillion in 60 days to deal with a bad situation, we can also materialize $15 trillion to rebuild the framework that connects us to our country and each other.

Work, cultural sharing, and elements of travel and sports could be reckoned with by moving some of these activities into virtual environments. By moving jobs into the virtual space, we are inviting people to learn skills, practice a new type of crafting, make videos, create art, and have an environment where a lot of people can gather, share, and conduct business.

We could address land use, the environment, and city density while services and luxuries are delivered to the home no matter where people are geographically located in the United States, but all of this requires those who are most afraid of change to let go of outmoded ideas and help guide a new generation to taking the reins while making a serious effort to improve our nation.

That, or we can wait until we are all beggars.