Old or new, normality is our home

What is happening to the average American?  What about the exceptional American?  What about me?  What is happening to all of us with what is going on now?  Changes to the waist lines of all those successfully sequestered.  Americans staring at their hoardings, their hoarding staring back and saying “Eat me!”  I’ve seen an increase in people outside recreating which i assume means these are people whose jobs allow for working from home - professionals who I see riding their bikes on Hill Road.  And what of those that have been laid off - are they also self-quarantining only waiting for the arrival of unemployment checks, their subscriptions to various streaming services about to run out - and the free previews of all the services that “stepped-up” to give these people something to do.  But weighing on their minds at some level they must be wondering when the freebies will be revoked. What then?  Where is the money going to come from? The other side of the paywall.

I’m glad to get out as much as I have.  One thing I take note of is a hope that the US will return to normal.  I say this because of my desire for stability for my family and I ask my ancestors to help protect us … and to make us stronger.  I want to go out and eat with my family when we feel like it.  I want to take my kid to new bike parks.  I want to buy beer from Jackson’s without feeling like I’m imposing on the clerk’s health.

We will return to normality - normality is our happy place.  It may be a different normal or a new normal but it will be our ever-present home room soon enough.  What will change? It is being studied right now.  A social science experiment is being conducted on a mass scale.  As we seek to return to a semblance of the old normal, pundits are already asking what that will look like.  And linked to that “what” is a “when” - if our attitudes of proper social intercourse are being altered then when will it be deemed satisfactory to sit in an office, venture out to restaurants, or attend sporting events?

When will we be ready to pollute more?  This is a topic being studied and commented on right now, roads populated by essential commuters - if the old normal traffic can be allowed again it will surely return.  If people can live less simply in order to satisfy manufactured needs they will and though pollution and consumption are kind of looked at as negatives they really symbolize success - in our society - and will absolutely be abided.

The ruling, what, cabal?, are still ruling.  I say (and don’t just about all of us?) I want a return to (the old) normal, that place of stability, that place of the known and somewhat predictable.  And this desire does also accept some negatives associated with the way “business was done” in pre-pandemic days.  Not just things like pollution and materialism but other things that more completely exemplify the social structure, that are sadly more essential features of the system.  And their essentiality/essentialness is marked by a commensurate level of opaqueness, hiddenness, things partially visible but mostly existing in the shadows, the American Shadow in a Jungian sense.  I.e. the air we breathe.

These are the meaner parts of our civilization, the parts that are discussed in broad philosophical-religious-psychological terms yet manifest in very real ways.  Progress becomes pollution and free competition becomes gross materialism.  And this “becoming” has now “become”.  Progress is pollution, making money is a desire to wastefully spend.  I remember the Kyoto Protocol, in the 1990’s, how the US would not be subject to measures to protect the environment because it “would seriously harm the economy of the United States”.  Two decades since then and during those intervening years the knowledge of damage to the environment has increased while the US as a money maker (in different proportions) for all classes has flourished.

We know but we still do it.  We deny facing this contradiction and place it in the bag of shadows.  We then lose the ability to talk about these issues and cannot find the words.  But perhaps not finding the words is actually a skill.  Perhaps it is a good thing.  We block out the things that challenge us and settle into our “normal”.  Which is feeding the shadow.  This is the structure of the world.  This is the social structure. Our system of government.  Our system of finance.  Our system of acceptable mores and conventions.  Our fallible human natures cast upon the American landmass.