Creating a New Normal
There is no way out but forward.
With rage so great it makes your heart shatter,
When screams are unheard nothing else matters.
What is the definition of the normal people want to get back to? The normal from before the COVID-19 quarantine, from police violence, from racism, from the complicit deaths of black men and trans-women? We as a society in allyship with the marginalized and demonized, with the victims and the survivors, with those for whom this country has never been the safe haven touted across the globe, have to untangle how to create a new normal, because the old normal has never ever worked.
Making a new normal requires dismantling capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, racism, white supremacy, incarceration for profit, rape culture, political prostitution, the free flow of arms sales, the lack of mental health care, the medical-industrial-pharmacological complex, the five companies that own 90% of product economics, and the five tech companies that own all our data.
Making a new normal requires limiting how much billionaires can profit on the labor of their employees, how much of their profits they can legally keep, how much of their income they must pay into an uncorrupt governmental system which does not yet exist. Making a new normal requires an equitable distribution of wealth.
Making a new normal requires hearing, acknowledging, and witnessing the lived experience of those citizens whose lives have begun with genrational and historical trauma, for which no one has ever been held accountable. Making a new normal requires all those who have not had this lived experience to be self-aware of their own privilege and grateful for it.
Making a new normal requires that those who believe they *govern* the public learn that they have chosen to *serve* the public interest.
Making a new normal requires not just studying the history of this country but adding the voices that have been silenced, hidden, and corrupted in the writing of that history by those who survived with all the power. Making a new normal requires the acknowledgment that atrocities have been committed by those whose color or religion or immigration history gave them advantages that others did not have: whether that was the indigenous peoples who pre-dated the first illegal settlers, or those who were forcefully brought to the country as slaves, or the Japanese families incarcerated in internment camps before the second world war, or the Muslims who have been vilified and ill treated for the last many decades, or those of Asian ancestry who have been bullied since the current health pandemic began. It has been the goal of those in power to nurture hostility between all these ethnicities to their own advantage.
The new normal cannot be achieved without finding the common humanity within us.
Making a new normal requires removing blind greed and blinding hatred out of the thinking of old white men who were born to pimps and slumlords, raised by maids and hirelings, who have grown up never having healthy behavior modeled for them.
This is a formidable task: to create the new normal. Walls need to be taken down to create the healthy boundaries of this Utopia, and if it is to succeed, all of us need to work towards this goal together.
For anyone reading this who questions the three words in the image below, or what these words signify, or responds with ‘all lives matter’, this is for you. For your elective ignorance and deliberate obtuseness, I am too angry to even weep for your soul.
