The “Normal” People Want To Get Back To
After Trump, people just want to get back to normal. But what is normal? Normal is plastic bags and plastic bottles forming plastic islands in our plastic oceans. Normal is perpetual war in countries all over the planet. It’s having an ally chop up a journalist one day and selling him advanced weaponry the next.
Normal is school shootings and an opioid addiction caused by the pharmaceutical industry. Normal is corporations giving money to the candidates of both parties. It’s division and hatred and the inability to talk out our problems. Normal is an addiction to oil that is literally, literally, killing our planet.
Normal is for-profit healthcare that most of us can’t afford, especially if we ever really need it. Normal is Hollywood blockbusters whose scripts require approval from the Pentagon. Normal is English princes and U.S. presidents having their pictures taken with people who rape girls and use them in their blackmailing schemes. Normal is the media not talking about it.
Normal is not worrying about all the things we have no control over. Normal is believing you have no control over the things that are most important. Normal is buying people Christmas presents you can’t afford that will end up as part of a plastic island in the middle of the ocean before next Thanksgiving.
Normal is always being afraid. Because even now that the big orange guy is gone, we’re all still afraid. Normal is never being able to stop being afraid long enough to look beyond the immediate media-induced crisis in order to think about where we are all headed.
Normal is trusting corporations to solve the problems they created. Normal is thinking the only way to achieve peace is through war. Normal is nearly everyone with a college degree being so in debt that they will never be able to work at the kind of job they hoped to have when they started college. Normal is knowing you’re going to vote for someone you dislike in the next election because there will just be a different version of the orange man that simply cannot be allowed into office.
Normal is the amount we spend on defense increasing every year and never feeling any safer. Normal is stuffing the thought that we have nuclear weapons that have the potential to wipe out all life on earth deep into our subconscious.
Normal is thinking all of this is normal, or at least being too afraid to ever think much about it at all. Normal is walking the path of least resistance through cattle chutes that lead us where we don’t want to go.
Normal is voting for someone so bad that they lose to Trump. Normal is voting for someone worse than you voted for the last time and the other side voting for someone worse than they voted for last time.
Normal is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a better result. Normal is not having time to think about it because the media is telling us to worry about something else.
Normal is what the media tells us is normal. Normal is us listening, and doing what we are told.
Normal is refusing to put on the glasses. At any cost.
It’s funny how hard people will struggle and fight in order to stay on what they perceive to be the path of least resistance.