that which is normal
hyper-normalization and its consequences
The house, our house, is on fire.
The entirety of Los Angeles County is a disaster zone.
The air, already some of the most toxic in the Western Hemisphere, now carries trillions more invisible, health-corroding agents. The water, ambiguously usable. No one will say. The reality being deemed too unimaginable and panic-inducing. Short-term risk analysis or negligence or both. Both.
The walls are caving in, burning down, destroyed. The edges tighter, less room, less air, for more people; an immediate, felt squeeze.
On the first day of his second term in office, Trump signed twenty-six unilateral orders into law.
We no longer belong to the World Health Organization, nor the Paris Agreement. The death penalty has been expanded and the federal government can take back ownership of private, for-profit prisons. Under this government, there is no such thing as a transgender person; complete cultural erasure; a direct threat to erase.
The military is equipped and permitted to violently hold our ‘borders’.
All of our social media platforms are state-owned, run, and censored.
Oil drilling will continue, full force, while our cities burn.
The walls are creeping in, building taller, armed. Aimed. Ready.
We are an island of rotting, disintegrating debris.
We are a matchbox primed to be lit aflame.
We are waiting to be consumed. Smiling. Sweating.
During this first phase of the ceasefire in Gaza, Palestinians are permitted to return to their homes. After fifteen months of constant bombardment, psychological and physical torture, and global abandonment, they have been permitted to return to collect their dead from under rubble and dust and ash.
While the West celebrates, feels proud of this non-achievement, settlers in the West Bank are torching Palestinian homes. The IOF has killed more than one-hundred Palestinians since the ceasefire was agreed. Shot a child dead in the street on Day 1.
Trump says he is “not confident” that the deal will hold. Musk delivered an excitable and clumsy s*eg h*il at the inauguration and was protected by the ADL under pretenses of “nuance” and “clinical awkwardness”.
I am meant to pretend none of this is true, real.
That the skies are blue and sunny, that my coffee shop down the street still stands and that should be enough to hold me. That because I can sit here and type this, because I have a job and a home and a community and an able body that should be enough for me to feel comfortable looking away. To not name. To not turn others heads and hearts towards. To let everyone keep pretending.
Walking around Los Angeles in the days and weeks after the fires, while there is actively toxic ash flying around, while entire neighborhoods remain half-standing, I am confronted with the sharpest snap-back to normalcy I have ever felt.
With each devastation, inching closer to home, now here, it is astounding how taught that rubber band is. The one keeping us clung to a world that does not exist. That has not existed. That will not ever exist again.
“I’m talking to my family and friends. Many told me they wished they didn’t return to their homes to see them. Every house is either destroyed or burnt.
Many families are digging with their bare hands through the rubble to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones”
- Mosab Abu Toha
Many of my friends have lost housing in the LA fires. Many are digging with their bare hands through the rubble to retrieve precious memories and sentimentals, now gone forever. I am seeing many of them cave under the grief, understandably. I am seeing many of them start to connect the dots. To realize that relative safety is not safety at all.
I am seeing them look down at their hands and the debris-divets in their knees and remember the pictures they’ve seen every day for the past 15 months from some far off somewhere else. I am seeing them move their index fingers cautiously, testing the theory, only to feel the red thread pull and move something back. I wonder if there is joy in that, for those who have waited for their thread to be acknowledged, for signs of life to come through and witness them.
I wonder if there is grief that it took so long; that it took personal tragedy to care.
I wonder if there is nothing. If there is an empty, exhausted space where life used to move freely. I wonder if it is worth wondering about it at all.
Lately, I’m having way too many conversations with people who are asking how soon they can go back to their lives. They ask me about time horizons spanning only days to weeks. They shutter when I say it will take years to clean up the ash. That we have hemorrhaged all of our already-hemorrhaged resources. That it is unknown when any of them will be replenished and if restoration will sustain or even feel like Los Angeles as it has been known.
They are angry with me for saying it. For not letting them pretend. For not playing into the story that this is just another blip.
Alexei Yurchak, a Russian anthropologist, coined the term hypernormalization to describe what it felt like to live in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s before its collapse. In his book, “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More”, he describes the phenomena as “an entropic acceptance and false belief in a clearly broken polity and the myths that undergird it.”
From a 2016 New Yorker article about the concept, “the Soviet system had been so successful at propagandizing itself, at restricting the consideration of possible alternatives, that no one within Russian society, be they politicians or journalists, academics or citizens, could conceive of anything but the status quo until it was far too late to avoid the collapse of the old order.”
Of the millions of dollars and services and life-saving health information that has been circulating in the wake of the LA Fires, I would argue that a large majority of it has been community-led. There is one of the most inspiring networks of mutual aid spanning the whole city, and, yet, there is no prominent state presence. It took a full week after people had already been exposed to the most harmful consequences of the fires for the Department of Public Health to make any statement on the dangers in the air. The most valuable information came from the Coalition for Clean Air, a non-profit focused on statewide air and climate protection, during a 2.5 hour webinar on Facebook Live. (highly recommended watch for the most helpful information about the air/water/risk across LA).
Private, small businesses are spearheading the organization of evacuation shelters, meal preparation, and fundraising. We are stretching ourselves until we are translucent, happy to show up for one another, distracted by the endorphins of care to realize that there are entire state-run entities that have failed to even make an effort to show up. To do their job. To provide the exact function and purpose they were created to.
And thank fuck for that. Thank god we have each other’s backs in such incredible, selfless ways. I am proud of this city and I am proud of every single person that has shown up to recreate memories that were lost, to cook and feed anyone too weary to feed themselves, to provide spaces for deep rest and care, to take even 10 of their own dollars and give them to a stranger. Those who have spent weeks driving around the city delivering supplies, or giving their time to organizing donation sites so that they feel participatory and exciting rather than a dreadful march to collect other’s unwanted things.
But as @badschoolbadschool on Instagram notes, these very same reasons to celebrate are things we must remain conscious of as they are direct markers of a failed system.
Last night, I hosted a workshop on normalcy and asked:
If not the ‘eternal unconsciousness’ of normalcy (coined by a participant in the class), who and what are we committed to?
If normalcy serves as our basis for emotional regulation, stability, and belonging – primal behavioral drives – what else is possible? What else could give us those things, and even more? How can we remain value-aligned and driven while feeding these needs?
Another participant, and friend, wrote to me after the workshop:
“We hold close to normalcy like we ‘have’ it. An innocence/ignorance chosen because it gives us a sense of illusionary gravity. Nobody discovers normalcy, because it only exists when we’re not hoping, not wanting, complete in our wants/needs/to need for nothing… Perfection remains perfect, while life continues growing.”
He continues,
“Love is an endless Discovery. The bane of normalcy. People either want to feel normal, or they want to feel loved. If people choose to discover themselves, their wants and needs, and extend this devotion to learning their world the way they are deserving fo every day, then love would be abundant, truth wouldn’t hide from it’s needs, and the new normal would be to witness ourselves growing with devotion to our endless loving discovery.
I meaaaaaan…
From Wave of Blood by Ariana Reines,
“...The history of love is hard
To write because it is made
Of the same intestinal pulses
That all bad things in this
World emanate from – the sparks
Of desire and mutual recognition
The giving to another the power
To render you meaningless
It’s a consent the guts give if
Your parents don’t teach you
Otherwise. Probably their
Guts flinched the same way. ...”
***
I am writing this as drones of air purifiers whoosh in the background; constant, everywhere. All the people I love are exhausted and scared. All the people I love are loving, acting, more than I ever thought anyone could. And still.
I find myself nostalgic for times past, for the days before the fires, before the genocide escalated, before the electionS(!), before, before. Take me back, take me home. Home. Show me someone with an answer. Give me someone to take orders from if it means I can go Back. If I can rest. If I can be okay.
But I know that all before-times were also standing atop fractured stilts.
Only now do we know that we are freefalling, grasping for ground as it flies overhead. Catching one, any one, and climbing on top to pretend that this new land is ours, safe. Pretending that we were not, just moments ago, falling, scared, uncertain of if we’d hit the ground and how hard.
I am asking us to consider that perhaps this reaching is why we remain unable to cope with the fall. What if we were able to be honest with each other about what is happening regardless of our attention? What if we realized that to live is to ceaselessly fall and fall and fall; to find moments of pause, glimmers, and then return to the flow?
It is not easy, and, in fact, can feel entirely dysregulating and exhausting. But what if we focused on how to make the reality that things are ever-changing tolerable, favorable, sustainable instead of insisting we Return to a false set of loose ties that are barely holding this thing together.
If we are honest with the shit we are in, and we validate that reality for ourselves and others, what could we Do together to move through it. With it.
The aspect of hypernormalisation that stuck out to me the most was the fact that people’s dissonance was not because no one saw the cracks or didn’t want them to change, it was that no one could fathom a different way was possible. No one knew where to start, and so apathy and normalcy were systemic coping mechanisms.
“When apparent stability disintegrates, As it must— God is Change— People tend to give in To fear and depression, To need and greed. When no influence is strong enough To unify people They divide. They struggle, One against one, Group against group, For survival, position, power. They remember old hates and generate new ones, They create chaos and nurture it. They kill and kill and kill, Until they are exhausted and destroyed, Until they are conquered by outside forces, Or until one of them becomes A leader Most will follow, Or a tyrant Most fear.”
- Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents
We haven’t even begun to deal with it. Not then, less now.
I feel heads turning, hearts opening. I also feel the wind from so many arms swinging, reaching, clawing for something to stand on to pretend that they could never fall like the rest of us.
Holding on in hopes that if we just don’t acknowledge it, it will all go away.
This has been the case, but it is so jarring to see in the face of so much direct loss — in the most recent convergence of all of the systems’ failures.
When discussing where her ideas came from for Parable of the Sower, a fictional novel (prophecy) set in an apocalyptic society post ecological and economic collapse, author Octavia E. Butler famously said (in 1994),
“I didn’t make up the problems, all I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”
And she’s right on time.
So, if there must be an answer or a conclusion to any of this, let us look to a spiritual ancestor of Parable — Emergent Strategy by adrienne marie brown:
Small is good, small is all (The large is a reflection of the small)
Change is constant (Be like water)
There is always enough time for the right work. There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.
Never a failure, always a lesson
Trust the People (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy)
Move at the speed of trust
Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships
Less prep, more presence
What you pay attention to grows
Apply this everywhere in your broad, all-encompassing life.
To do this we must look - honestly. Help others to look. Name together. Act accordingly; act precisely.
A place to start. Trust what follows. Trust what organizations it leads you to, which small acts you take, which conversations you can have. Trust that it matters, greatly, and that it ripples. Trust you don’t have to be groundbreaking or extraordinary. You just have to start.
It is, unequivocally, not safer to pretend that everything is okay, that the city still stands, that having the wealthiest men in the world stand proudly behind the President of the ‘Free World’ is fine and kind of silly, that we are not pummeling toward a reality that is too scary to even imagine.
It is human to feel terrified in the face of that. What we need is to not let that freeze us or force us into pseudo-reality. What we need is to feel that fear, meet its eyes, and decide, together, what the fuck we are going to do about it. To help others find the courage to look. Because we can do. Our only option is to do. And at the very least we can acknowledge we live in the same reality together.
Do it because we love each other and because we want to see that love grow in ourselves, in others. Do it with joy and with rage and with laughter.
Do it because our choices matter, our attention matters, our actions matter.
Because another way is possible and we are yearning for it and all we have to do is have the courage to bring it to life. The way of now is not law, not natural, not normal. It is not insurmountable.
Look with me.
Readings + Resources:
LA Mutual Aid Spreadsheet - (ongoing)
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More - Alexei Yurchak (2005)
Hypernormalisation (documentary) - Adam Curtis (2016)
Coalition for Clean Air Webinar (Jan. 2025)
Wave of Blood - Ariana Reines (2024)
Parable of the Sower - Octavia E. Butler (1993)
Emergent Strategy - adrienne marie brown (2017)
Beautiful, perfect, and so so needed. Thank you.