What Normal Are We Talking About?

There has been an awful lot of talk recently about some hypothetical return to normal. “The vaccine is coming,” said the New York Times on Xmas morning, “and Trump is going. Sometime in 2021, life will begin to look a lot more normal.” Please disabuse yourself of this lie immediately. There is no more normal. Normal is out of the question. We used up our entire stock of normal long ago.

Having said that, normal has always been overrated. People should pay more attention to history. What a shit-show.

2021 will be a profound disappointment. It will not be a return to anything. It will be a slow procession into the dense cloud of bullshit that is crowding out all of the clarity and security in the world. We are not facing one problem, or two. We are facing multiple simultaneous problems.

What does the Times foresee if only two small alleviations occur? We get “the” vaccine for COVID-19, and we get a new president? Even taken together, these things do not represent any kind of magic wand. They are not even a decent set of crutches to help us make forward progress.

The vaccine, for instance. People talk about the vaccine as though it were some panacea for all of our current confusion. Let's consider the vaccine for a moment. How many are there presently? The many now being rolled out include a Russian vaccine, but most people that I talk to don't trust it. Is it a fake? How about the Chinese vaccine? People seem to like the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but but there are doubts surrounding all of the current vaccines about how long they will be effective. Will they be effective against all strains? How many mutations are currently at work?

How many developing countries will get vaccine this year? Or even by 2022? Will they get Hail Mary vaccines from dubious sources, like India? Will the “international” hospitals in the developing countries get a supply of the real vaccines to sell at market prices? Like $100 per person? I could pay that for my wife and I, and I would, but most people in my adopted country could not.

And who in their right minds thinks that Trump is going away? Even if he leaves the White House, which is beginning to seem likely, why should he leave the political scene? All of the action, and all of the money, are right there. 71,000,000 people voted for that asshole. They still think he's a straight shooter! He's here to save the country! They're still sending money to his re-election campaign! Most of those yokels who pay attention to the mega-church “pastors” will stick with Trump even if the phony religious leaders abandon him.

There will be Q, and there will be idiocy, and there will be guns. And there will be Trump.

And there will be President Joe Biden. He is still the same Joe Biden that he has always been. I don't expect him to wake up and start doing the right thing all of a sudden. He has no track record of supporting or advancing any helpful social programs. Unless, that is, you are a fan of mass-incarceration. I've been laying off Joe because getting Trump un-elected was job one.

But Joe will reach across the isle! There will be cooperation in our polity! He may try, but there be no cooperation. It's enough to make me scream out loud that no one seems to remember what the Republicans did to President Obama only a few short years ago, and to ask people to recall the Republican's treatment of President Clinton is like asking them the beginning and ending dates for the Mexican-American War. You get dull stares.

Americans are not famous for their mastery of American History.

There's a lovely and very old Chinese proverb that says, “the mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away.” Get it? So what if the Emperor is an dangerous asshole. He's a thousand miles away in his palace, and there are huge mountains between us. We are safe to live our lives in peace, because we are far beyond the Emperor's ken. If there ever was a “normal” in America, it happened when the mountains were high, and the Emperor (the Federal Government) was far away. Small town America was relatively autonomous. Now, there are no mountains, and the Emperor is in your home. Your neighbor's doorbells video you leaving your house for work in the morning. Every traffic light reads your license plate to track your commute. Your phone tells the world where you are every moment of the day.

This is not the “new normal.” This is a weird dystopic vision brought to vivid life by our wonderful new technologies. Welcome to our nascent future. You're not going to like it.

What would normal look like, if such a thing were still possible?

Normal would be a luxurious ice cap covering the Arctic Sea.

Normal would be plentiful, inhabitable, comfortable islands in the southern and western Pacific Ocean. Remember Fiji? The Marianas? Tuvalu? Soon most of the Philippines will be so crushed by storms that vast areas will be abandoned for habitation. The others that I mentioned already get crushed all over again before they can be rebuilt. The populations are wondering: do we need to leave? The population of American Samoa is migrating to the continental United States as soon as it is individually practicable.

Normal was average Americans growing up, getting some kind of shit jobs, probably only the husband working, getting married, and being able to buy a house, have a car, and raise a family. After 1935, they had Social Security. They had a lot more security of all kinds than people have now.

Normal would be a slow and manageable break-off of portions of the Antarctic ice shelves. Now pieces as big as Rhode Island are breaking off. Normal was a “Greenland” that was some kind of joke, because it was actually white from coast to coast. Now the ice is quickly melting, and all of this fresh water is going into the oceans. We are seeing powerful effects on ocean water temperatures and salinity. The acidity of the water is changing. The flow of the major ocean currents is changing. Only jellyfish seem to like the new ocean water. No one will like it if the Gulf Stream turns south, causing everything north of Spain to freeze solid.

Normal was mild to moderate fire seasons in some states, and a mild to moderate hurricane season in the mid-Atlantic. We had regular wars and pandemics, too. Not all of the normal was pleasant. But it was more predictable, which made it all easier to deal with.

Whatever normal was, it is now long gone. Don't be shocked, because that won't do any good. We have made our new world, and now we must live in it. Its effects will vary from family to family, from country to country. They may hit you in between the eyes, or in the teeth. But they will hit you. If you are most people, they have hit you already.

The Mystery of It All

It's all very mysterious, this new world.

COVID-19 is the sniper of viruses. So many sufferers are asymptomatic. Their temperature is normal; they look and feel fine. They're just wandering around, touching everything and breathing on everybody. Not to mention that it hits everybody in a different way. It presents with different symptomology in young people as opposed to older people. There is also a wide range of ways that the virus can affect people of the same age and medical history. Do they get the “second week crash” or not? Will they be in the ICU for a month, or will they go home in three days? Many sufferers are simply sent home from the hospital and told to quarantine themselves, stay in bad, and take Tylenol or something.

The vaccine idea has elements of mystery to it as well. There are now something like four that are being distributed and administered, with another four or so to follow soon. These are all different. No one is quite sure for how long they will be effective. Some of them may require booster shots every year or two. How will that all play out?

COVID-19 will find a way to lurk out in the corners for a long time, decades if we are particularly unlucky. A no longer surprising number of people are saying that they will not take the vaccine. Their reasons vary from almost reasonable to completely insane. No, people, Bill Gates is not using the vaccine to put the Mark of the Beast on you. George Soros is not using the vaccine to track everyone in the entire world.

Warfare. The nature of warfare has changed, and most people seem not to have noticed. The old formula, front lines advancing, occupying territory, blowing shit up, armies wearing uniforms, all of that has changed. The number of countries around the world that are either building or buying aircraft carriers is shocking to me. Isn't that a bit like building battleships after 1944? The days of their utility may have passed. Battleships still functioned nicely as bombardment platforms after their obsolescence, but their original role as ship-to-ship gun fighters was as dead as the dodo.

There will still be the local dust-ups in the ungovernable areas of the world, but war will heretofore be much quieter for the major powers. We are probably at war with Russia this very moment, an undeclared cyber war. And with other countries as well. North Korea for sure. Maybe China. Even against satellites, it seems like a waste of resources to use rockets of some kind to blow them up. Why not just hack them, and infect them with viruses? Or, even better, repurpose them and use them against their original owners?

Why expend vast resources on manpower, explosives, and delivery systems to destroy an enemy's infrastructure when you can launch a computer attack and accomplish the same thing from the comfort of your bunker in Colorado? The Russians have been doing dry-runs for years, and are ready to hit the ground running the minute the next war starts in earnest. They had a great success shutting down a large segment of the Ukrainian electronic grid simply by reprogramming the transformers to overspin themselves into destruction. That experiment achieved all of its goals. It proved that they could do it, and it proved to the Ukrainians that they were helpless to resist Mother Russia. This very month (December, 2020) the news has been full of reports regarding hacks in various American intelligence agencies. The Russians love to poke around inside our most sensitive computer systems, testing their own capabilities, and leaving back-doors to facilitate future attacks. Just sightseeing! For now.

In more conventional areas of warfare, there have been great advances in the miniaturization of nuclear bombs and the speed and accuracy of their delivery systems. Things could get very exciting.

Our Climate. Everyone seems to agree that we have a serious problem with the climate, and also to agree that we are not doing enough about it. The general response, however, seems to be, “let's wait and see what happens.” Really, that is not going to work.

We should all have learned from our own little lives that foreseeing potential problems and making effective plans is a much better way to manage our lives than coasting along and allowing the decisions to make themselves.

The mysteries here will bring difficult choices. Which areas of the world will become uninhabitable, and in what order? Who will be a host country to displaced populations? Which crops will begin to fail first? What will people eat when the staple crop of their area fails?

We are already seeing Pacific island nations beginning to give up in the face of these numerous super-storms. We are already seeing various plants failing to propagate due to rising temperatures in their regions. I suppose that I'm starting to sound like a geezer version of Greta Thunberg, but I think that lovely young woman is absolutely correct in her main thesis: all of our so-called leaders, every one of them, has a sacred responsibility to husband our life-sustaining environment and resources, and they are all failing even to take the problem seriously.

That, to me, is a real mystery. It is also a fatal error in judgment on their part. This isn't a harmless game of kick-the-can (down the road, as it were).

“Normal” is a relative term. Normal is a word used to describe prevailing conditions, whatever they are. A popular word to describe the prevailing conditions where soldiers were located during World War II was, “SNAFU.” (Situation normal, all fucked up.) There was a lot of talk about “normal” during the presidential election of 1920. Warren Harding's slogan was “return to normalcy.” He was talking about the situation that prevailed before World War I. Is the New York Times suggesting that we return to the situation that prevailed before the election of Trump? The eight years of Mr. Obama's presidency? What sane person would want to go through that again?

Maybe this is just the sad admission that we have been tolerating inadequate leaders and terrible conditions for the entirety of human history, and with Trump we achieved the certain knowledge that America's political system is so full of holes that a really dangerous, deranged man like Trump can waltz right in and take over, making matters exponentially worse. Our great luck is that Trump is no Hitler, no Stalin. Trump is more of a “Killer Klown from Outer Space.” He will not be taking power permanently. The way has been shown, though, and lurkers in the dark have been taking notes. We may not be as lucky the next time, and if nothing is done to firm up the foundation of our political way of life, there will definitely be a next time.