“Going back to normal” is a deeply pessimistic idea. And it represents a fatalism we cannot afford to encourage.
Normal is gone.
If it ever existed, we aren’t getting it back.
Normal wasn’t good enough, anyway. It kind of sucked, actually. Exploited people, social injustice, widening inequality, worsening health outcomes. Normal was a train wreck pretending it’s a high-functioning adult.
I get the impulse to want that verses a pandemic. But that’s like preferring garbage to toxic waste. The part about security and not dying is obvious and yet the more we talk about it, the more we endorse garbage. Garbage is relatively better, but that doesn’t make it edible. Or desirable!
The problem with normal is that most of the time for middle class white people, normal was livable. I’m not going so far as to call it good, what with medical bankruptcies, increased work for less pay, and utterly disappearing free time. But it was tolerable in a I-guess-this-is-life-now way.
What we call normal also was also dealing with diverging realities: cultural gains for minorities with economic loss for the masses. So it can feel like we’re headed in the right direction and the wrong direction at the same time, depending on which metric we are using.
Normal has also been four decades of steady decline in every community in the United States with fewer than 500,000 residents in the county. Outside of metropolitan communities, decline is our normal. And has been for nearly half a century.
Over the last four decades, normal has come to mean doing it yourself. Whatever it is. And normal is also the economic conditions which make it impossible for communities to reverse the decline themselves. This mirrors the decline in individual upward mobility during the same period.
Normal is the decline and the structures that ensure the decline. It is the inequality and the structures that ensure the inequality. And the injustice and the structures that ensure the injustice.
In other words, normal is a dead American Dream. For individuals and most communities throughout the country.
Normal is deeply pessimistic. And seeking to return to normal is short-term, pessimistic thinking.
Few of us truly want that normal. At all. Because even the people who benefited the most from that normal were constantly seeking to benefit more from it! Even they are dissatisfied with it.
We aren’t supposed to want this, but neither should we want that. Which means, there’s a way better option in front of us: a new normal. A transformed world. And that gives me a lot of hope.
Let’s make a new normal. One that is more equitable and generous. One that reverses decline and makes more things possible.
To do that, we need to let go of what has died. So that we can be reborn.