Back To Normal

What we need, they said, is to get “back to normal.”

As I write this, we’re well into the fourth or fifth “wave” of COVID-19 infections, depending on who’s counting and how. Deaths are on the rise again in many states in spite of increased vaccination.

A few days ago a young black man, Daunte Wright, was shot and killed by a police officer over yet another vague insinuation about registration tags or air fresheners or something, literally a few miles down the road from the ongoing trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd. People are protesting nationwide, with the attendent arrests and further abuses of police power that we’ve come to expect here in the “land of the free.”

Our love affair with mass public shootings got off to a high-energy restart in March, when a man who later blamed “sex addiction” went on a killing spree targeting Asian-American women in massage parlors. Since then there have already been so many public shooting incidents I’ve lost track, and it’s only the fifteenth of April.

It looks like normal is exactly what we’ve gotten back to, and just like the normal we left behind when COVID started, it sucks. Millions unemployed or underemployed for no reason other than that it’s profitable for a handful of oligarchs. Millions without reliable or even meaningful access to health care for no reason other than that it’s profitable for a handful of oligarchs. Millions without access to education, and much of the education they can access deliberately distorted, for no reason than that it’s profitable for a handful of oligarchs.

A nearly extinct middle class. The death of popular leisure. The rise of profit-based humanity, when what you “deserve” as a human being depends entirely on how much profit you’re willing to generate for a handful of oligarchs. It’s hilarious and terrifying to me that just in my lifetime we’ve gone from glorifying the dream of a day when nobody needed to work, to vilifying the idea that any decent person would ever want to do anything but work.

Racism. Sexism and other gender-based bigotry. And of course, always, classism…except some of y’all who thought you were “us” have found out the hard way over the last year or so that you’re “them” just like I am, so now what?