IN pre-lockdown days I had a much-ridiculed addiction. Using Snapchat Maps online, I would click all over the map to see the ‘stories’ of random people I didn’t know in all corners of the world.

I’ve salivated at the making of bolo de rolo – a sort of Brazilian Swiss roll – in Rio, gasped at ten people squished into a tuktuk as it wove its way through nose-to-tail traffic in Bangkok, and smiled at family groups gently pushing overweight cats in swings in a play park in Tijuana.

In fact, so excited would this pastime get me that I’d often stop conversations to proclaim to pals: “Check this hedgehog dodging traffic in Jerusalem right now!” (As far as I’m aware, no animals were harmed.)

This week, after a break from Snap-Mapping (I was told it was "becoming a problem"), I had another look and, wow, it was a very different world that greeted me. The palm tree-lined boulevards of Riyadh, Abuja and Florida lay empty, the sun burned clear and bright in the usually grimy skies over Varanasi and the street markets of Dhaka lay bewildered and beggar-free, save for the occasional nervous shopper in surgical mask and gloves.

Someone had filmed the lapping seas of a deserted beach on Pattaya with the built-up hotels and nightclubs ghost-like in the background and in Delhi an underemployed taxi driver filmed his passenger-less journey with the caption, “India fights Corona, together we can do it!”

It felt like a moment to stop and think about what can be achieved when the world truly acts as one. I know we’ve had a pretty good reason to feel compelled to act – the threat of death is quite a motivator – but it really should make world leaders sit up and notice the power of 7.8 billion people.

Together, in the blink of an historical eye, we have reduced emissions, dissipated the smog above major cities, provided sustenance for many of those who need it, put roofs over the heads of those who didn’t have one and realised that, in the face of a pandemic, as humans, if one of us is fragile and vulnerable then we are all fragile and vulnerable.

Yes, our economies have suffered; yes, the global stock markets have fallen through the floor; yes you can’t give oil away at the moment, but if that doesn’t give us a clue about how messed up our old ‘normal' was, then I’m not sure what will.

Listening to the silences and examining the four walls of apartments on my Snap Maps jaunt made me think this was a unique moment in our history, and one we must surely capitalise on.

It reminds me of a painful eight-week period in the summer of 2000 when one of my brothers was in a coma in St Thomas’s Hospital in London. The rest of the family had congregated at his bedside to pray, hold his hand, ‘talk’ to him and make plans for him: when he got better he would stop working so hard at his city job, he would do more exercise, he would eat better, he would have interests and hobbies (I would have suggested Snap Mapping but it wasn’t a thing back then).

I told my friend Clare of the family’s vision for his future, but she gently remarked, “Don’t expect too much from him, he’s been out of it the entire time, and soon it’ll be a distant memory.” And sure enough within six months of his recovery, despite all our protestations, normal, unhealthy service was resumed. He remains sick to this day.

My fear about this moment, as we are thinking about the end of lockdown, is that we are all so desperate to get back to normal service that we are happy to view the last eight weeks as a sleepwalk or a bad dream that’s to be put behind us.

Like my brother, we all know the old normal was not good for us, not in the long term anyway, and certainly not for everyone. We know that ending global poverty would be a good thing. We know that climate change is devastating our environment. We know that homelessness is utterly unacceptable. We know that cancelling debt for poorer countries is vital for the economies of those countries, and we know that war brings death and creates hunger and refugees – but we are happy to go back to that version of normal. Or are we? How powerful would it be if we all decided that we were going to fight these enemies the way we’ve taken on coronavirus? What could be a better prize for winning the struggle against the virus if we then decided to make other changes that would lead to healthier, more fulfilled and more enriched lives not just for us, but for everyone on my Snap Map.

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