Don’t Blink – Normal Might be Changing
Wukan Protests (photo credit: AP / Getty Images)
Are you toeing the line? We’re depending on you. It’s a matter of survival. Get to work. You’re lucky to have what you have, so stop complaining. These lines are thrown at us from all angles, and until recently they actually kept us in line. After all, we’ve been told that the alternatives are much worse. But are they really? Now, we’re not only starting to wonder, but we’re also beginning to ask questions in return.
For example, President Obama is being called “distant and aloof” because he’s not playing the political game that all Washington insiders are supposed to play. In a NY Times article, according to Representative Dennis A Cardoza,
“When you have relationships with individual members, you can call them up and ask a favor, and a lot of times, if it’s not objectionable, you can get things done.”
And yet the story indicates that the President likes to surround himself with people he likes and trusts. He may not play the game like everyone wants, but he seems to be trying to stick with what he accepts as his truth, even if it goes against the grain.
The previous example shows that, in essence, the US government is being run by people doing one another favors. It no longer has much to do with their promise to work for the citizens who elected them. In many other countries, the people get even less promised and a whole lot more taken. And we wonder why things aren’t getting done effectively anywhere. You can’t run your business by only worrying about the personal favors of your very limited circle, and still remember that there’s a really big world outside of your personal bubble that is counting on you. Eventually, someone’s going to fall out of favor, at which point they won’t be counted in the big picture. And when everyone accepts this type of behavior as the norm, they soon forget that the outsiders will consider this action to be wrong, unbalanced, and more than just a little bit selfish, as it’s not looking at the real big picture.
Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition (painting by Christiano Banti)
Yet if you question this lifestyle, then you’re deemed to be a radical or subversive because you want to shake up status quo. We’re so used to just accepting things as the way it’s always been, that we seem to forget the times when they actually weren’t this way. Nothing in history is sacrosanct, as history continues to prove to us. Monarchy? Well, they can be stripped of their powers. Aristocracy? Who needs them if they’re stealing from society. Politics? This corrupt game’s boogeymen are really ugly in the light of day. Money? Where did it all come from, where did it disappear to without our knowledge, and why can’t everyone share? All of these questions and more are being asked, but answers just aren’t forthcoming from those who demand conformity. It’s probably because they’re not quite sure why it failed either. It had been working for decades, so no one expected things to just suddenly break.
If you question the legitimacy of the things remaining like they used to be, then the present seems to be a time made for you. What was once normal is wearing a black eye from the one-two punches that have been inflicted by forces outside of its control. And yet there’s still a fairly large group of people who don’t want to see status quo change. Some have a lot to lose, while others can’t stretch their imaginations that far yet. So, there’s a battle being waged with two sides, the past and the future, and it’s wrapped up in every action that society has accepted as normal. But what happens when normal is found to be so substandard that you have to replace it with something new? How do you decide what to replace it with? And how do you get other people to accept the new normal? It looks like we might be starting to find out.
2011 is tolling its final chimes, although they sound exactly like the sounds of time forgone: a little tinny and extremely hollow. It’s nothing like the rich cords that are recorded in the annals of our history. Could our historians have forgotten that the past tends to be less vibrant when compared to the prospective future? Or perhaps they’ve been instructed to use deeper chimes that will enthrall us so that we don’t notice what they’re obscuring and why.
At one point, we thought that we were the center of the universe. Until the curious looked around and realized that there was a whole lot more to reality than what we observed. Although we continued to build our universe, we still try to put ourselves at the center, as though we are irreplaceable. Until nature shows us again and again that we’re just a small part of a very large community. Our roles continue to get rewritten by the true history of life, and we continue to fight our placement. And so it’s the same within our society, as we use our personal ideologies as some sort of base truth that mustn’t be questioned.
How do you feel about this personal belief? (This is supposed to be a comedic take on religion.)
