After sixteen months of various degrees of lockdown due the coronavirus pandemic, we are allegedly nearing “normal” life. The governor is pronouncing June 30 as the “reopen” date for the state, depending on vaccination rates. I’m not exactly sure what that means for myself personally, since being one of those “essential” workers means that this hasn’t exactly been a long paid vacation; I’ve had to take the same long bus ride every work day with the same rude people who think they don’t have to follow the rules of behavior (who want to make you “fearful” of being called a “racist” if you` point out the rules about wearing headphones and respecting the people sitting around you), and once in town, there is nowhere to go but the office building because there is no place to sit, just places to stand for a few minutes or to just walk about to waste time. `
Since I have to use my legs for most of my transportation needs, what the weather is like is always a concern to me, and the local weather report—which generally is only reliable within 12 hours whenever there is a “chance” or “probability” of precipitation—is probably the most important “news” of the day for me. I have always been fascinated by numbers; I recall in a college classroom one day we had a guest speaker who seemed to be impressed by the fact that I was writing down every word she said—until she observed that the guy sitting next to me couldn’t stop chuckling, because he could see that I was just doodling rotisserie league “fantasy” baseball statistics.
But anyways, I’m interested in precipitation figures, so that I can “assure” myself that once we reached the “normal” amount, why might expect some “relief.” At the end of April the amount of precipitation recorded at Sea-Tac Airport was an inch above normal, but at the end of May, even though it should still have been .16 above normal, the NOAA numbers showed that it was actually well over an inch below normal. There certainly must be a mistake. But no; it appears that the new “normal” is the average amount of precipitation over the previous decade, which has gone up from 37.49 to 39.34 inches. I prefer the old “normal” to the new one, but so it goes with global warming and climate charge: “normal” never stays the same.
So when things do get back to “normal,” will it really be so? We may get through the pandemic, but there are many things that are “abnormal” in politics and society today, and there is no reason to believe that “normality” will overcome what has become “abnormal” any time soon. It is quite possible that what sane people regard as abnormal may become the new “normal”—we won’t really know one way or the other until the 2022 mid-term elections, or beyond.
Abnormal behavior, it seems, is the “norm” at the present time for much of this country. Just a few days after there were multiple mass shootings across the country over a six-hour period, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson signed a law that makes it illegal for local and state law enforcement to enforce federal gun laws, which one suspects is itself is unlawful and certainly must be decided in court. No doubt supporters of the law are counting on the U.S. Supreme Court backing it; with a 6-3 right-wing majority, it seems “safe’ to pass such an insane law now. “Violations” of a “citizens” right to own any weapon they choose without restriction is punishable by a fine of $50,000; “normal” people are pointing out that this amounts to “defunding” the police if they choose to obey federal law.
You rarely hear of gun violence in Europe, save that committed by neo-fascist groups; gun violence is not “normal.” But in this country, gun violence is “normal.” In 2020, there were over 600 mass shooting events, and over 19,000 victims by gun violence—both numbers the highest in memory. According to the Washington Examiner, one of the law’s supporters, Mike Brown, claims that unrestricted gun rights is “critical to the preservation of our Republic”—meaning the white nationalist version of it. Brown runs a “Frontier Justice” shooting range, which of course implies lawless “wild west” vigilantism. Brown also claims that such laws are “necessary” because “some people may not spend a lot of time thinking about the Second Amendment.” Of course if they did, some of those “people” might wonder why all these guns around are not actually doing much “protection” for people being killed by guns.
Meanwhile, my old “pal” Thom Hartmann, who I discussed in my very first post and who is the reason why I started this blog, recently had one of his operatives send me one of his posts to my inbox entitled “Rightwingers are Surfing on Trump’s Bullying & Getting Away With It.” Quite true; Trump is a bully who has made bullying and every kind of self-obsession “normal” behavior in which only those who also share his traits belong in his new world order. This requires a dearth of empathy or compassion for anyone outside Trump’s own skin—and that “skin” is as thin and flimsy as tissue paper. Trump delight in causing “fear” and “pain” apparently has no limits because there are no lines he cannot cross for his most fanatical supporters, who seem greater than their actual numbers because they are louder and more threatening than those who just want to get on with “normal” life.
It is this “fear” of Trump’s abnormal supporters that drives most Republicans to at least publically support him; but on the other hand, there are Republicans who were already “bullies” who simply kept their proclivities under wraps until it was released not necessarily by Trump himself, but by Republican voters—most of the them nursing racial, nativist grievances and ugly stereotypes—who not only approved of Trump’s tendency to violent words and actions, but “finally” felt free to act out on their own impulses, as we have seen with the increase in ”Karen” incidents in this country. This is the “new” version of the “old” normal, when white racial grievance festered during the civil rights era, not just in the South, but in other major cities where “integration”—particularly in public schools—caused a great deal of anguish among white parents. Just in case anyone needs a refresher, the school busing issue was the reason for this famous frame that occurred in Boston, where some local “rednecks” gave a black lawyer the “business end” of what their idea of America was.
The new “normal” includes the invading the Capital building to attempt to overthrow an election, calling insurrections “peaceful patriots” just out for stroll in the park, to hold sham recounts six months after an election to give credence to an abnormal man’s belief that he will be “reinstated” in the White House come August. The new “normal” hopes to carry on in the future with neo-fascist governors like Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem, and making it “normal” to pass laws that allow Republicans not only to rig elections, but protest their own rigged elections if they lose them on the federal level, and to invalidate election results they don’t like and declare themselves the “winner”—or at least that is what the language in many of these new “normal” election laws seem to allow them to do.
Is this the “republic” that people with fascist tendencies want to be the “normal” way of running a country, “protected” by the firepower of extremist militias? They keep talking about “freedom,” yet what they want is to be their own personal “dictator” oppressing anyone they hate. They apparently want to be fascist black shirts who uphold other dictatorships who have “republics” in their official country names, like Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Botswana, Chad, China, The Congo, Cuba, North Korea, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, Uganda, Vietnam, Yemen and Zambia. None of these countries can be said to be ruled by “the people,” but by authoritarians who feed into the hatreds of certain elements of the population who are willing to carry out violence against the opposition. This is what Trumpists want to do with this country—and what they don’t realize is that they will lose their own “freedom” as well.
Who knows where the new “normal” will take us. Jason La Canfora of CBS Sports tells us that Packer management’s “petty ways” is “hard to watch.” Yeah; I checked out his twitter page, and while this “concerned citizen” says the “right” things about BLM and other so-called “liberal” interest groups, of course he has his anti-Latino blind spot just like the rest these fakers; one of his “favorites” that he wants people to check out is the anti-immigrant hate group FAIR, whose founder, John Tanton, has expressed his intention to maintain a white supremacist country. These are the kind of supporters Aaron Rodgers attracts; this probably explains why he only gets upset when white teammates are cut. Oh, you think no one has “noticed” that?
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