We All Just Want to Be Normal Again
How ever-present chaos has corrupted the American way of life
I was speaking to my students the other day, and the subject of 9/11 came up. I remember telling them what a terrible day that was, but I also told them about how that day brought Americans together and how I, a person who absolutely detested George Bush, cheered for him as he made that iconic speech from ground zero. I rallied behind him, as all my friends and neighbors did, and for a time, everyone dropped the self-serving nonsense and focused on how America should respond to the attack.
My students found that odd, and given the world they have grown up in, and how different it is from the one I lived in at their age, I understand.
When I was their age back in the 90s, I had times, sometimes entire weeks, when I never thought about politics or war or terrorism or any of the many threats that existed in the world at that time. It’s not that my world contained no dangers, or that I was oblivious to those dangers, but I had a belief, and most of the time it was a rational belief, that our leaders could handle those problems. I did not have to keep them at the front of my mind every minute of the day. In short, I could live my life because our leaders, whether I agreed with them or not, were mostly competent and capable.
The same corruption and incompetence that exists now existed then, but it was not nearly as concentrated as it is today. There were scandals and embarrassments and political intrigue both locally and on the world stage, but the frequency of these events was nothing compared to what we see today. Today we see an impeachable event almost daily, and a new scandal every few hours, and before we can process the terrible thing that just happened, the next terrible thing pushes it off the front page. Rinse and repeat. This, for many people, and especially for young people, has become our new normal.
And I believe I can responsibly speak for many if not most Americans when I say … we’re exhausted, and we just want our old normal back.
We want to live in an America where the Department of Justice works for the people, where the FBI isn’t run by an absent drunk, and where the Secretary of Defense isn’t a ridiculous dude-bro who thinks war is a video game. And most of all, we want to live in a time and place in which the leader of the free world isn’t an adjudicated rapist and con man with a criminal history that would make Genghis Khan and Al Capone look like saints.
I said all of this to my students, and for some time, I really tried to convince them that there was a time when my version of normal existed, at least for many of us. They listened politely, but I knew they didn’t believe me. After all, how could they? I was telling them about something they had never seen, and something many of us believe may never exist again. And this disbelief in simple concepts like normalcy is the real legacy of Trumpism. Up is down. War is peace. Truth is a lie.
And chaos rules.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.
Let's face it - we were never "normal" in America - just terribly uninformed, majority ignorant, everyone pretty much in the dark about what we're now learning, - not normal - but blissful, shielded, arrogant, privileged. - - - as this has been in the works for decades.... with all that's happening in this chaos, eyes are beginning to be opened, ears and hearts hopefully listening - now we need to decide whether to stand up to the task at hand, to tear down and root out the rot, root out what's broken beyond repair, own our part in the mess, build something more durable, fair and sustainable, more transparent....this is the hard work ahead ....