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The End of Normal

Culture, climate change, and the ironic promise of collapse

Anna Mercury
Age of Awareness
9 min readJan 8, 2025

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Photo by Free Walking Tour Salzburg on Unsplash

If there’s one thing I think we can depend on this year, it’s that nothing will go back to normal. I’m not sure what normal is anyway, if it’s an actual state of affairs or merely a subjective emotional experience. Is there a normal way for society to function, and if so, what is it? If normal is just a feeling, then what are we doing when we “normalize” something?

David Smith of The Guardian sounded the alarm this week about the perils of normalizing the second Trump administration. These days, the public seems to feel some “Trump fatigue” that has dampened our hunger for resistance. The elites in politics and the media seem to be taking a softer approach to Trump as well, either because they expect a more measured, reasonable second term than the first, or because they expect more extreme crackdowns on dissent. Smith’s point is that, either way, this false sense of security is lulling us into a trap. He argues that Trump’s second term will be, if anything, “even more extreme, even more provocative, even more outrageous than last time… a wake-up call to the normalisers who are sleepwalking towards disaster.”

Normalizing ourselves into disaster: is that what we’re doing now? That is, after all, how fascism historically has taken hold of a country. It’s the frog in

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Age of Awareness
Age of Awareness

Published in Age of Awareness

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Anna Mercury
Anna Mercury

Written by Anna Mercury

Animist anarchist, trying to write a new world with the ashes of the old | www.allgodsnomasters.com

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