[Maydianne Andrade] So the problem is that we need to have space for the bikes to come in and out. Right? So we have to keep this clear. So do you and your friends talk about coronavirus...

[Woman] not really.

[Maydianne] Not really, eh? So you guys don't talk about it at all?

[Woman] No.

[Maydianne] We hear it a lot. "We're all in this together." What does that really mean? What is social solidarity? I am Maydianne Andrade and from the University of Toronto, this is The New Normal.

[Maydianne] I'm always looking for things for the kids to do and they'd asked me to hang the punching bag somewhere. So I went outside with Glen to the shed to see if we could find a spot to hang it up. Glen's 12 years old. I asked if he thought something positive might come out of this.

[Glen] Well, nothing is ever just kept the way it is. It always changes.

[Maydianne] Social solidarity speaks to our need to work together to get through this. How much of the need to work together will forge in us new tendencies or expectations that will help us in the days to come?

[Glen] So I feel like people, after this is over, people are going to be like, we're going to keep this unity for however, but then after like maybe 10 years it'll crumble.

[Maydianne] So. Okay. So that's interesting cause we had, I talked to this professor named Eric about that this week.

[Erik] Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. It'll be interesting to see how things shake out. You know, this solidarity, this coming together and whether or not it translates into some sort of political will.

[Maydianne] This is Erik Schneiderhan. He's a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He wrote a book called "The Size of Others' Burdens: Barack Obama, Jane Adams and the Politics of Helping Others." And I was really curious on his take on social solidarity and isolation in the pandemic.

[Erik] It'll be interesting to see the pots and pans banging and, you know, the singing on the porches. Is that going to translate into more real stuff?

[Maydianne] So I would say for the first time ever, I'm sitting down with and having conversations with my friends, not sitting down with unfortunately, but simultaneously at separate computers, with my friends who are fairly right-wing and family members. I have a brother who's CFO of a shipping company and he's saying "Trudeau's doing a pretty good job." Other friends who are really left-wing are sitting down and saying, "Doug Ford is doing a good job." And that's amazing.

[Erik] Yeah, I had that exact conversation with a buddy of mine yesterday. There's almost a sense in which both Trudeau and Ford have kind of grown up, you know, and it's not buck-a-beer anymore, right? This could be the future of the Canadian economy for the next 25 to 40 years, the choices that they're making now. And I think they've grown into it a little bit and that's kind of, I guess that's heartening. It's heartening to see that people can change. I think that's very much the case that people can grow.

[Maydianne] You mentioned the banging on pots thing. So our neighborhood doesn't really do that. What we do, like I left notes on the front steps of a couple of my older neighbors just offering to get groceries or whatever. And there's a lot of people volunteering for those kinds of organizations. It's like people are desperate to do something in the face of something so huge. We don't do the nightly pots and pans, but my daughter Lily and I are volunteering at the UTSC food distribution center.

[Maydianne] Hi Melanie.

[Melanie] Hi.

[Maydianne] How are you?

[Melanie] Good, how are you?

[Maydianne] Good, good. Melanie, this, is my daughter Lily.

[Melanie] Hi Lily, nice to meet you.

[Maydianne] Some of the changes are really important. "How are you?" And not just the "How you doing," of the past where you expected an "Oh, I'm fine," but really: How are you?

[Erik] What I'm realizing, and I think some of my friends are realizing, are the limits of social media and to feed that need to connect with people. For example, there's a group of people at my local pub, they would get together. Some of these are former Brits, right? And they would have a drink every day and see friends at five, six o'clock and now that's gone.

[Maydianne] That's your local, right?

[Erik] Yeah. That's my local and it's really created a gap, a void, particularly for a lot of these people who live alone. Veronica and Joe, it's really nice to see your faces.

[Joe] Hello.

[Erik] You can see Joe's eye. All you have to do to spur Neil on is mention two words: "Manchester" and "City." [laughter] Then he picks right up. This is a new abnormal.

And so the hunger to have a Zoom call, uh, it started with five people. I organized it and now we had 20 joining in, popping in and out just to chit chat and make a few jokes.

[Joe] Somebody sent me a, a little joke the other day and it said it was a hooker and she's leaning into her car and she's saying, "I'll do anything for 50 bucks." And the guy says "Do you cut hair?" [Laughter]

[Erik] That's been wonderful.

[Maydianne] A colleague of mine sent a video. It was actually spoken, spoken word poetry and part of it was post-Raptors win. And so I thought it was really interesting to think about the juxtaposition of that type of social solidarity, which was all around this joyous celebration versus what we have now, which is physically separate. But I mean that one, like everyone is touching each other and high-fiving and hugging and, you know, and actually I cried watching it. I was just like, I mourn that.

[Sports announcer] "Canada! The NBA title is yours!"

[Erik] I mean there's, there's certainly going to be memory where we're going to remember this.

[Maydianne] If you had to predict like one aspect of social solidarity that would, that would weave its way through and remain intact on the other side of this, do you think the political solidarity will be maintained? Do you think it will help us be more generous with each other even if we still disagree? Or...

[Erik] I'd like to think so. I think there, there is a sense of common cause that we are all just humans at the end of the day. There's a line of theorizing around citizenship and thinking about citizenship as, in social terms. Not as like, you know, a passport or a certain set of legal rights, but as, you know, a set of rights to be healthy and to get a basic education and to have some dignity. And there's a sense in which I think we're all seeing things stripped down to that. And maybe because of that we'll be a little kinder, a little more open, a little more understanding.

[Maydianne] We don't know yet what it's going to look like on the other side, but some of us hope that this social conscience continues.

[Erik] While also maybe celebrating joy and realizing that we just need to laugh.

[Maydianne] Yeah, definitely.

[Erik] It was remarkable how when we had the good weather, I guess last Friday, it was sunny? Or Saturday, it was Saturday. Everybody came out on the street and just stood in front of their houses, because it was the sun, right ?

[Maydianne] We're outside and we're soaking it up.

In the end, the birds are singing. I think I've been considering this in terms of luck. Will the good things survive and the things that were bad, that have diminished, will they maybe not come back? But it's not luck we need. It's effort. It's consciousness. It's thinking about the things that we want to retain. Social solidarity should be an aspiration and one that we continue to have, even when the threat is gone.

My name is Maydianne Andrade and this is The New Normal.