1. Accountability needs to become a thing again. People feel and act as though there are no consequences for anything. Freedom doesn't mean no concern for actions and words.
2. Expertise needs to matter again.
3. Western society needs to care about others again.
4. Commitment to democracy and democratic principles must be rekindled.
5. We need to protect our planet's ability to sustain us.
None of this is easy, or simple.
What is so hard to deal with, watching the rise of Omicron is the sense that we are not learning anything, as a human race, not just about COVID, but on how to work together when confronting a common threat. It has long been a feature of science fiction that when confronted with a threat to us all, we would drop petty differences and join together in a common fight. That was clearly the fiction, as ironically a fair amount of the sciencey stuff is making its way into reality.
Without buy in from citizens of the industrialized countries to vaccinate AND to share the vaccine with the poorer countries we are condemning ourselves to repeated emerging variants and hard decisions about locking down and what normal life is going to be like for our decedents.