Normalizing Hate

I overheard someone talking in the coffee shop (my office) the other day, they said

we’re going to have to start planning to travel differently because we’re not vaccinated

coffee shop lady

I was thinking immediately, that makes sense. I mean things are so different and of course if you weren’t vaccinated you’d have to start thinking about how to travel differently, if you wanted to travel. Normal. I continued to munch my croissant and do my work. But something was knawing at me and I didn’t know what it was until hours later.

What the fuck are they talking about and more…what the hell am I talking about!

Normal?

NORMAL?

This is not a vaccine debate. If it becomes a vaccine debate anyone that cares about practical freedom has lost. So before I get into it, let’s look at what “practical freedom” is.

Practical freedom is freedom of movement, freedom to say words without the intent of causing harm, freedom to walk in the world as if it belongs to you and all people, freedom to operate your life without MORE (and this is the key word, “more”) coercive control from laws, government, authority. I’m not talking about ideological freedom, I’m talking about the freedom inherent into every born soul. We are not born to governments and we are not born to laws.

This woman in the coffee shop wasn’t saying, this is bullshit, I’m going to do something about this. She was saying, the world is changing and we need to adapt to how it’s changing. Nothing actually wrong with this except when the changes in the world end up making people’s lives smaller. To put it a little more responsibly, the changes don’t make people’s lives smaller, people make their own lives smaller in response the changes they see in the world. The woman could say, wait a minute, I’m not standing for this I’m going to make some noise, this is not ok. But she didn’t. She did what most of us do, and that’s react to the world and usually react in a way that is accomodating. When the rules are crowding in, accomodating is not always the best choice.

What’s worse was my reaction. I was like, yeah, makes sense. She’s gotta change the way she’s doing it. Makes perfect sense, adapt, accomodate, figure it out, make it work.

Bullshit.
For real.

Have you heard of “Normalization”. Of course you have. It’s normal to hear about it. But it’s a real problem. It’s the frog in the pot problem. So what? So what? We’ve heard this all along haven’t we? We’re frogs in a pot, temperature is slowly going up, getting ready to boil us alive and we’re like…oooooh, so nice, it’s a little hot but ahhhhhh.

There is a woman in the United States of America, talking normally about how to change her travel plans because she has a different belief than the people with the guns and because if she doesn’t opt for some covert or at least way scaled back and accomodating travel, she will be persecuted, disallowed, ridiculed and possibly worse. She doesn’t have “the card” so she doesn’t have access.

She doesn’t have “the card” so she doesn’t have access.

Wow. And me, just sitting there saying, yeah, good idea she has.

Wow.

Normalizing “the card”. Normalizing division. Normalizing it’s ok for these things. Normalizing not working harder for a better answer than “no card, no access”. Normalizing the effects of this laziness and fear as long as it doesn’t effect us, right now. Normalizing not thinking a little bit bigger to see where this leads.

Normalizing.