By ELSIE EYAKUZE

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To celebrate the week of the unique date of 22-02-2022 — which I hope you did too, as another Great Twosday is very far into the future — I took a break from trying to find where the cutting edge of the news was.

The old adage that ignorance is bliss has a lot of truth to it. I spent that time doing something that, in hindsight, might not have been the wisest choice of alternative.

I looked into comedy and documentaries, two of the most depressing genres there are. If you listen to good comedy you’ll end up with people who are good at holding up a mirror to society, and if you watch a few decent documentaries you might learn something of how the world works. I am not sure that these two things are particularly healthy these days.

2022 is the year when, globally, we made an unspoken pact that after two years of Covid-19 we were all going to try and go back to “normal.”

This new normal is quite a ways away from whatever normal was in the Before Times.

I had time to remember that things got weird long before the global pandemic even hit. There is a whole generation being born that will have no idea what the Before Times were like, but at least they may grow up not having to “give Grandma a kiss” or even touch strangers if they don’t want to.

Why didn’t we invent the fist bump earlier?

Bit of a daze

About those Before Times: take, for example, Tanzania. During her recent sojourn in Europe, President Samia Suluhu Hassan met with Chadema politician Tundu Lissu and they had a discussion.

When I found out about this, it just blew my mind. I went into a bit of a daze to somewhere between 1995 and 2015, when this would have been a relatively unremarkable piece of news.

Head of State holds talks with politician from opposition party: big deal.

Remember those times when Chadema and CCM used to hold rally fashion competitions and it was amusing to see who copied whom when it came to their polo shirt designs and how they initiated the “My Crowd is Bigger Than Yours” debate long before Donald Trump even thought of it?

In fact, remember when the very idea of Donald J. Trump running for and becoming the President of the United States was such a ludicrous idea we made fun of it?

And then somehow it actually became part of this reality and suddenly it looked like World War III was probably going to be mildly initiated by the US under Trump attacking North Korea after he had a disagreement with Kim Jong Un, who he visited by the way.

And then I blinked back into the present to find that Chadema’s Freeman Mbowe is still in remand with a terrorism case to answer, political rallies are still not quite allowed in Tanzania.

Also, Covid keeps mutating, so we might have to try to keep vaccinating against this almost perfect bug for years to come.

And the artiste known as Diamond Platnumz apparently has a confederate flag in one of his newest videos?

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s dressing down his own Chief of Intelligence across a huge room about the bits of Ukraine he is busy “liberating,” and it’s President Biden — not Trump — who has war talk on his lips as the American side of NATO, which might be retaliating.

The last time I pointed out that we might end up in a nuclear winter if bombs go off, a smart aleck asked me on Twitter whether I lived in Europe. We don’t even acknowledge the fact that this time, unlike the last, with the help of technology maybe nukes, like computers, have become significantly more powerful?

This is it. This is the new normal. And you know what? I have decided that it is fantastic, because it is so unpredictable and absurd and influenced by social media and the internet, where our human hive mind lives.

Yet it is completely normal. The future is as optimistic as it is pessimistic — especially if you completely ignore the environmental crisis, which we are all doing.

Honestly, there is so much to appreciate. For example, we have universally accepted the fist bump, which is a great stride forward. Antivaxxers will either disprove science or win the Darwin Awards for themselves which will be fascinating either way.

Social media has removed all belief in humanity’s collective good and sanity. In small groups, we are great. In very larger groups, we turn into something that should really be in a facility that can help with the voices in the head.

Those of us who have got this far got to experience Twosday, a once-in-a-century phenomenon.

Turns out the new normal is just the old normal with a filter of the surreal over it, played at 1.5 speed.

It’s going to be fine, or absolutely horrible, as it always has been.

By the way, this time the Revolution will be tweeted.

Eyakuze is a consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report: E-mail: [email protected]