For anyone distressed by White House politics in 2017, it was necessary to resist behavior that seemed divisive, outrageous, insulting, crude, immoral, and destructive to the rule of law. In a word, those things shouldn’t be normalized. We heard the term buzzing around President Trump’s head like flies he casually swatted away. It’s not necessary to relive the moments of bizarre abnormality that emerged this past year — the pot is still boiling.
I find myself reflecting instead on how one of the most necessary traits in human psychology became a troubling quandary. To normalize basically means to turn the abnormal into the acceptable, and without this ability, we would all be isolated and frightened for much of our lives. Traumas like the first day of kindergarten, when a protected child is set loose among strangers without his mother, are rescued by turning school into a norm. Later in life, the potential crises of puberty, which is totally abnormal to a presexual child, or menopause must be faced and accepted in order for normal life to proceed.
We learn to normalize much bigger threats. Dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima brought unspeakable destruction into the fabric of everyday life, and so catastrophic were those events that the ensuing Cold War was never fully normalized. We simply learned to desensitize our dread as best we could. The thinness of returning to normal was recently revealed when North Korea forced the…
