Back To Normal

Apparently for some folks “now what” is “desperately scramble back to the crap we used to put up with, because at least that was predictable and safe.” You may hear me looking down my nose at you but I’m not; I understand better than you think.

You see, this is a common thinking pattern in codependency – families and loved ones of people who are addicts. The drunk or junkie gets sober and then of all things you, the codependent, find yourself thinking like “well jeez at least when he was drunk all the time I knew how to deal with him.” Nuts, but also very real. I lived through it; I know. Was way easier to lift five bucks off the old man when he was passed out.

So I get it. I also get that it doesn’t work and never did and we have to set that nonsense aside now. We’re evolving – in real time, at high speed, and we’re watching ourselves do it and can make choices about how it happens… and into what we finally evolve.

We have to reject these self-serving hypocrisies that we’ve so fallen in love with. We just love to be the heroes in our own movie, but we rarely stop to think that maybe we’re the bad guy…and the unfortunate reality is we are the bad guy far more often than we like to believe. Not only are we the bad guy, but a lot of what we’ve been taught to believe was good about us is bovine excrement. The taming of the wild land and noble savage by the educated European; the grand and sweeping reforms of democracy that were for white, land-owning men only; the common defense that defended the wealthy with the lives of the poor.

We’ve been coming to terms with that for a minute now, especially for the last fifty-five years or so, since the great cultural revolutions of the 1960’s. Unfortunately some of the terms we’ve come to may be as misguided as those we’re rejecting. Wide-eyed credulity has been supplanted by bitter, arrogant cynicism; is that an improvement? We continue to think of our democratically elected governments in “us v. them” terms, and in so doing continue to fail to understand our role both in our government and in our society; we continue to look for someone or something to blame rather than working to solve the problem we’re complaining about. We engage in empty, performative gestures, but then when someone is sincere we doubt and discredit them.

I’ve talked about this in my own field as well, right? The audience clamors for authenticity but not without ten thousand dollars worth of studio effects on it. We want informed and passionate advocates for justice, but then we give all the airspace to the same fifteen voices working for the same six companies that we always have…unless we want to look smart, then we go off the rails and end up in Alex Jones land.

What about any of this merits any rush to get “back to?”