Normal?

 6 9 2021 

 

Normal? What’s that? I posed this on Facebook, saying:

I see people wondering if life will ever get back to normal. Was it EVER normal?

 

Of course not. Normal doesn’t even exist. I’m glad a discussion ensued. A couple of people said it’s a setting on a washing machine or a dryer. Others said it was more normal before 2016. 

 

But was it? I’m one of the people who has become aware of how others live in the last year or so. I mean, I always knew that racism (and all the other “ism”s) exist in our country, on our globe, everywhere. But I really had never stopped to think what it’s like to BE Black in this country, or to raise Black children and to have fears that no parent should ever have.

 

There are, of course, many other issues that deserve discourse, but I’m tackling this one today.

 

Maybe, before the overt racism emerged with the twice-impeached president, things were “normal” for some people, people who were comfortable, complacent, and unaware, much as I have been for most of my life. Now that I know, and that everyone else who was unaware should know, too, I see through a different lens. There’s no rose tint. There’s not even a clear view of many things I used to think I saw.

 

I always knew that there are no people who are normal—those don’t exist. Everyone is their own person and none of us are the same. But I see that my grocery store, my town, my neighborhood are not even the same for everyone.

 

I have yet to see how this will affect my writing. First I have to see how it will affect my life.

 

Images from Pixabay.com