What is normal? That’s not an unusual question and undoubtedly overused. How many parents have looked at their child and thought why can’t (he) be normal? The older we get the less “normal” the world appears, as the “normal” we understand shrinks before our eyes.
Perhaps not in three generations, since World War II, has there been such a call for returning to “normal” as what has come out of this last year of radical change. Additionally, for the past four years a majority of the American people have been yearning for something they could call “normal” coming out of the Federal Government.
The problem is that “normal”, as we use it, is an emotional construct. It is essentially how we feel things should be. An analogous adjective, and far more useful, is the term: predictable. What we want is the reasonable expectation that a wagging dog will gratefully accept our petting, not the uncertainty that at any moment we could be bitten, because everybody knows dogs can bite.
If it is not entirely obvious, let me put it plainly. “Normal” is not simply a state of being with definitive constants and minimal change. Change, and sometimes dramatic change, is always happening. “Normal” is how we seek to live without fear driving our actions and our choices.
I’m am two weeks since I received my second shot (or as the British say: my second “Jab”). My initial normal will be to have unfettered contact with my children and grandchildren, but with the rest of the world…I may be challenged.
Even if I feel inoculated from Covid-19, would my unconstrained behavior cause distress in others? What about the slight chance of infection even with the vaccine, or what about those poorly explained variants? Worst of all…what kind of guard is necessary against other deadly infections floating about in the public sphere?
Many, perhaps most people in the United States and around the world have spent the last year looking at other people as if they were a clear and present danger. It’s almost been like a spinoff from the television series The Walking Dead.
Not just strangers, for which we have successfully (and unfortunately) taught generations to view first with suspicion, but also we have seen our friends and relatives as personal threats. There have been times this past year when I’ve mindlessly drawn near to an individual only to be reminded as they suddenly backed off, their eyes looking slightly alarmed.
“Social distancing” has been the norm now for a year and I wonder just how easily will it be to undo. You might think the light has changed from red to yellow, and when it turns green it will be kum-ba-yah all around. Don’t be too sure.
Fear is the foundational emotion which not only drives behavior, but it is frequently used as a means of control, notably for mercantile and political purposes. We have been inundated with it for a couple of decades and now supercharged with it during 2020.
Multiple studies of American social structure have shown that a majority of the Conservative voting public is literally afraid of Liberal voters, and that Liberals are equally fearful of Conservatives. That's just crazy. This impacts friendships, families, marriage, and business. If everyone’s political orientation were properly labeled across our chests would it also cause people to take wide swaths around each other in the supermarket?
Most
fear is irrational and almost all of it is created in the mind, not outside it.
The “normal” we want is not the world of 2019 and before. The normal I want is
to feel comfort in being able to reasonably predict that those I come in
contact with have more in common with me than not and that they feel the same. To that end we have see beyond those who are empowered by making us think otherwise.
