Normal

Normal

by Marco M. Pardi

“The condition of alienation, or being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. R.D. Lang. The Politics of Experience. 1967.

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For many years a common truism in popular psychology has been that clients in counseling feel much better when they are told their fears and fantasies are normal. It seems there is some innate desire to conform to the group to which one feels he or she belongs. This desire takes over even when we know there are problems. For example, we talk about sunrise and sunset even while knowing the sun does not move; it is an acceptable cultural illusion. But we don’t refer true believers in sunrise and sunset for psychological counseling, or at least a primary school science class. As the hideous phrase goes, we go along to get along.

Of course, there are escape valves from the culture game, if only imaginary. As a youngster who never seemed to fit in I slipped quietly through the folding doorways we call book covers, into societies of the past and societies of the future. In a well structured narrative I could feel quite normal. But at some point I recognized the problem: As long as I brought ME into that society everything was actually abnormal precisely because I was a person of one era slipping into a life, albeit fictional, in another era. And that, making everything new and strange, was the attraction. But if I had somehow truly been in that era I would have no awareness of a person from another era. I would feel normal. That is, no different from the person I was without the book. SNAFU (situation normal, all fucked up).

So, all these years I’ve been living in the normal, until the abnormal election of Donald Trump. And since then I’ve been advised to get used to the “new normal”. But what exactly is, or will be that new normal? At first it seemed to be a U.S. president who lied about everything. It was not that lies were never told before, but never told in these numbers and about anything and everything. But after the press counted over 17,000 outright lies and misleading statements we stopped getting the daily or even weekly counts. I guess we reached the new normal. Oh, Trump is speaking; it’s all lies. Move along folks, nothing to see here.

And then something new came along. And, of course, Trump lied. He said it was not as bad as the yearly flu. He said in the first warm days of Spring it would disappear “like magic”. How are these lies and not just mistakes or wishful thinking? Because early last Fall he was warned by the medical divisions of the intelligence agencies exactly what we were in for. His earlier de-funding of the scientific panels comprised of experts from across the science community to assess and develop mitigation for pandemics did not stop that community from also warning him….again. But there were deals to cut, money to be made, and career professionals who testified at his impeachment hearings to fire.

Okay, so we know stupidity yields bad results. Trump has been here a while, the country is more divided than it has ever been since the Civil War; this is normal. But covid19 is still relatively new, and so it merits examination for what it may usher in as the “new normal”. In times like these it is vitally important that we are aware of, understand, and take steps to rectify what we don’t see as much as what we do see.

The general public apparently does not see that, while our eyes are on the apocalyptic cloud of covid19, our lives are being changed, and even threatened by an orgy of de-regulation, hand-outs to mega-pollutant industries, incubation of a host of diseases in overcrowded holding facilities for migrants and asylum seekers, and rushed appointments of ultra-conservative judges to oversee it all.

And once the pandemic is under an as yet undetermined level of control, awaiting us all is the prospect of returning to jobs, gratuitous shopping, packing ourselves into mass transit vehicles, frolicking at “concerts” and sporting events; a better normal than ever before. Or so we are told. By a man who lies about the day of the week.

New normal. A recently completed and peer reviewed study from Harvard confirms what we have suspected for decades: Environmental pollution, particularly air pollution, provides the “underlying condition” that greatly contributes to fatalities associated with pulmonary viral infections. And, figures are already clearly showing higher corvid19 fatality rates in areas of the country blanketed by greater intensities of air pollution. But, the regime in the White House has made it clear they value money more than human life, or any other life on the planet. The regime is removing controls on the coal industry, allowing much greater levels of mercury, arsenic, lead, acid gasses, and lethal particulates to enter the atmosphere from coal fired plants.

This action by the regime rolls back the more than 80% reduction in mercury in the past decade. Mercury causes brain damage in infants. Although airborne in coal plant emissions, it settles in fresh water and penetrates filtration systems to find its way into drinking water and products made with water. No problem; both the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act are being emasculated to the point of being meaningless. Thus, no violations.

Arsenic, chromium and nickel are carcinogenic. Lead damages children’s nervous systems. Acid gasses cause serious lung disease. All are multiplying exponentially in our environment under the regime’s deregulation.

The Clean Air standards in place until the Trump administration saved 11,000 lives per year and prevented 7,400 heart attacks and thousands of asthma attacks. The health cost benefits were over $90 billion per year, outweighing the costs at a 9–1 ratio.

One would think a political party that loves money more than life would jump at that cost ratio. Well, no. Not when the owners of the for profit health and insurance industries are almost exclusively members of that same political party. They fight the Affordable Care Act and MediCare and MediCaid while promising (for decades) to provide a better health plan. So far, that plan seems to go as follows: The regime’s policies make you sick, you gladly pay to get well. Or, you die. Welcome to the New Normal.

As the fossil fuel industry, the truck and auto manufacturers, and the beef and pork producers frolic amidst the severely reduced emissions standards, particularly the super planet warming methane, the majority of people appear largely unaware of the melting circumpolar permafrost and its implications. Permafrost is a mixture of organic material and soil frozen in place for thousands of years. As it melts due to global warming vast amounts of methane from decomposed organics are released into the atmosphere, hastening the melting further. But along with that released methane is an unknown reservoir of hitherto dormant viruses, known as paleo-viruses. It is almost certain that many, if not most of these paleo-viruses have never encountered Man. And, of course, we therefore have no herd immunity to them. How are these paleo-viruses a threat for those who do not go near the polar regions? Simple. As the exposed soil dries and breaks down to dust the circumpolar winds, including the Jetstream, pick up the dust and blow it around the planet. I’m betting some of that dust in your home is micro-sand from the Sahara, and dust from Siberia.

The current political party in power in the U.S. has a long history of trashing health sciences, even defunding programs such as pandemic preparedness and response groups. All while rushing to provide us with the next pandemic.

Another landscape change we are now getting glimmers of is the effect of isolation, social distancing, home schooling, and unemployed family members on the children who will survive this pandemic. Calls to Domestic Abuse Hotlines have skyrocketed. Gun sales are soaring (gun dealers are considered “essential businesses”). Schools districts that can afford to do so are delivering meals to kids at their homes, or the kids go without. And districts that can afford it supply cheap laptop computers to home bound children so they can continue their school year. Of course, in areas with no internet access this issue is pointless. In homes where the electricity has been cut off because the now unemployed parents can’t pay, this issue is pointless. To worsen matters for children, several Republican governors are trying to completely ban all abortions – except a few “saving the life of the mother” – in their States under the utterly spurious guise of “conserving needed Personal Protective Equipment”. This condemns women to carry and deliver babies they will never be able to care for, seriously detracting from their ability to care for children they may already have.

An untold number of children are seeing their beloved pets dumped, at shelters or on the street, because their families can no longer afford to feed and care for them. I wonder how this shapes the psyche of the child.

But the ultimate example of Pointless might be what had up to now been the child’s willingness to enter into and contribute to what he had thought was a well functioning society. Can we now fault a child for turning his back on the pointless?

So what is to be our “new normal”? Will it be the incredible, never seen before, beautiful economic rebound promised by the loud mouthed, rotund carny-barker in the White House? Will it be a generation of young people hardened to think and act only for themselves as our planet becomes unfit to sustain human life? Will they see government service as merely a pathway to the satisfaction of greed? Or will there be an awakening that will throw off the nightmare that ignorance and frank stupidity has brought us?

Will we notice? Or will it all be “normal”?