Don't Go Back To Normal

Season six, episode six of The Simpsons was “Treehouse of Horror V”. One of the parts of the episode featured Homer fixing the toaster, only to have it turn into a time machine.

If you know what I’m talking about, then you already know where I’m going.

Homer keeps going back in time, where he tries not to change anything in the past, lest it change the future. But it’s Homer, so he keeps failing. He becomes more and more desperate to just get back to normal.

In the end, he finally seems to get it right. He gets back to normal. Almost. The vignette ends with Homer saying:

“Eh, close enough.”

The idea is that eventually a person becomes so desperate for “normalcy” that they’ll accept whatever seems close enough.

They’ll do this even if their formal “normal” was really quite awful.

Now, I’d written a lot more here. My letters-per-word and words-per-sentence averages were enough to make Microsoft Word 2000 blush.

I was trying to talk in a great big circle all around how we think about normal. Then I stalled out. Stayed stalled for a few days. Finally came to the conclusion that even though I kind of liked where I was going - I was going to talk about metaphors and idioms and associated linguistic bric-a-brac - it was all kind of a silly exercise.

So here’s the thing:

The “normal” we’re trying to “get back to” is the state of affairs which has allowed for this pandemic to kill and sicken far more people than it should have.

Of course it was also a much more pleasant existence for most of us. Given a choice between where we are and where we were, no question, we’d take normal back.

Still.

Look:

We deserve better than “normal”.

Let’s talk about where we actually want to be.

Critically, I think, we must drop our privilege and accept that we are much more expansive than who we normally talk about when we talk about we.

We include the residents of nursing homes, who have proven to be the absolute most vulnerable.

We include the inhabitants of jails and prisons, many of whom are there for non-violent crimes, and whose handed down punishments never included being put at the highest risk for exposure to a deadly virus.

We include the grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, and everyone else who never imagined themselves as somehow being anywhere near the front lines of anything at all.

We include all of the medical professionals fighting valiantly to keep people alive - those people often including their own colleagues.

We also include a lot of other people who are not faring well right now, even people whose complaints some of us might be tired of hearing. The lockdown in and of itself sucks. We didn’t have any kind of good alternate ideas in place. To some people it does legitimately feel like overkill. Those aren’t irrelevant feelings. Those feelings are going to part of driving future policy. Right now some of those feelings are being channeled unfortunately, but that doesn’t invalidate the feelings themselves.

Anyone who is suffering has a valid feeling. They may or may not come to productive conclusions, they may or may not form constructive opinions. But just because they aren’t suffering as much as others doesn’t mean that they aren’t suffering.

I’ll put it another way.

There are powerful people in this country who work very hard at dividing us. Don’t let them. Don’t minimize the pain of others because it fits a political framework. I’m talking here about avoiding things like redneck shaming. That plays into the divisions that the most awful people are trying to maintain.

There was talk in 2017 and 2018 about “not normalizing” certain behaviors eminating from the Oval Office or elsewhere. We’re past that now. That is part of normal: the normal we should not be striving to get back to.

Let’s not pretend that changing any particular officeholder is somehow a ticket to some imagined normalcy. Isn’t that just the mirror image of the MAGA argument?

I don’t want to go back to normal. I want to go some place better.

One thing which worries me - a lot - is that in the desire to get back to a feeling of normalcy, we will accept the equivalent of lizard tongues. Instead of fighting for better we will accept lesser. We will say:

“Eh, close enough.”

We may not have all the answers right now. But we can’t settle for normal, and we sure as hell can’t settle for something lesser than normal.

We - WE - deserve better. All of us.