The Dangerous Beauty of Normal Life Right Now
Nothing is normal right now, but it doesn’t always feel that way
Hello friends.
Image this week by high school student Jimena Argueta, courtesy of a project called “Picturing My Climate Future: High Schoolers View Their World to Come,” a photography and storytelling initiative where high school students document their lived experience of climate change. Now on view in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Thanks for sending to me!
Monday was cool and rainy. I sent out some pitches for articles. I made Alan Alda’s baked pasta, adding mushrooms and cherry tomatoes, and a thick layer of mozzarella. I ordered some stuff to round off the kids’ sleepaway camp packing list, and we made plans for the beach in August.
Tuesday morning for Spirit Week, my 8 year old dressed up as her music teacher, in a polo shirt and tie. We giggled as we applied stubble to her chin with an eyebrow pencil. Later, my husband and I discussed our tax bill and I did a runthrough for a Substack Live recording next week. My 8th grader was studying for finals.
Meanwhile the President of the United States summoned the National Guard and the Marines to Los Angeles, on the pretext of quashing protests against ICE raids, and without the consent of state and local leaders. He toyed with arresting the governor, too. “This Is Not A Drill: American Democracy Is On the Line Right Now,” said the pundits.
On Thursday, when the temperature nudged 90 degrees, I chaperoned Field Day in the park. E. won her class sack race, the local shop gave everyone ice cream cones, and federal agents frog-marched 52-year-old California Senator Alex Padilla out of a press conference where Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem was at the podium. In the hallway, three men force him to his knees and then to the floor, handcuffing him.
Nothing is normal at the moment, but it doesn’t always feel that way. One word for this is hypernormalization.
As Adrienne Matei put it in an incisive piece a few weeks ago:
Hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.
The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation…
“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has.”
Hypernormalization is a direct translation from Russian : гипернормализация. It’s coined by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, in his 2005 book about the very end of the Soviet Union, with the amazing title: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More.
M. Gessen one of my favorite thinkers and explainers of the time we’re in, is also of course Russian. They aired similar anxieties on a New York Times podcast this week, with the title “The Beautiful Danger of Normal Life During an Autocratic Rise.”
I think it’s a very human, and in a way very beautiful, desire to normalize, to habituate, to find our footing in any situation, and to keep on living. It’s sort of a great, life-affirming ability that we have, except it has a way of normalizing things that we really shouldn’t live with.
A brief list, should you need it, of what we must not live with right now:
Attacks on the Constitution, on the rule of law, on judges and elected officials, on civil servants, universities, on law firms, on trans people, on immigrants. Defunding of science, research, food for the starving and health care for the sick. Blatant lies. Blatant corruption. Cruelty. The wildfire smoke, the extreme heat, the tornadoes.
But subjectively most of our lives feel mostly the same. Human. Sometimes wonderful.
Gessen describes this habituation as similar to what unfolds in war zones: at first people are shellshocked, and within a few days they’re continuing life as normally as possible.
I saw this myself when I spent a month reporting in Ukraine. Two and a half months after the invasion, people in Lviv, in the west, had already started ignoring the air raid sirens. The hipster cafe next to my hotel made a perfect oat latte each morning. I was touched by the flower vendors outside the subway, and a soldier dancing with his sweetheart to a violinist playing outside the Church of the Transfiguration. She twined her arms around his neck, hand clasping a single red rose.
We adapt to the unforgivable, we continue on despite the unimaginable, we pray in the rubble.
This is beautiful and nothing less than human, yet it is profoundly dangerous. And it can also make you feel queasy and exhausted, like wearing the wrong prescription glasses, everything too close and jarringly far away at the same time.
What’s the remedy? What’s the use? What’s the alternative?
Saying what’s happening plainly and clearly feels good to me, and I recommend it. So does showing up as and when I can, and aiding the ones that need it in the ways I can.
We need to tune in and we need to take breaks.
The image that’s coming to me right now is of sailors midvoyage, long out of sight of land, trading off the duty watch. At some point, regularly, for every single person, it falls to us to stay alive to danger—to call it out as loud and as clear as we can.
Be vigilant, yes, when it is your vigil to keep. But you can’t keep a good watch if you don’t take your turn snoring in the hammock too.
At other times we cook and clean, mend nets, do the chores that keep us going.
Sometimes we will play the pipe and the fiddle and cheer and stomp away. Never forgetting we are at sea, singing about the storms, the beasts of the deep, and the ones we lost.
Sometimes we must study the charts that keep us on course, and keep the log for future wanderers.
And sometimes—sometimes—it is all hands on deck.
See you Saturday.
https://www.nokings.org/
Link
I enjoyed speaking to Rachel and Stephanie, who work as educational therapists, about the lingering effects of the pandemic on kids. “This is an incredibly rich discussion about how remote learning was a force multiplier for inequity, what it revealed about our values in the United States, and so much more.”