XIV: Say No to This Normal

“Can we talk about something else? I want things to go back to normal.”

We've heard people say this same thing vocally or implicitly, through their silence and inaction, through their posts of picturesque beach vacations amidst police brutality, not only in the past week, but the past few years.

Normal.

What is the word normal even supposed to mean? What does it mean to you?

Comfort? Considerable convenience? Maybe complacency.

Because the Normal I know is ignorant. This Normal is a follower. This Normal wants what’s easy. 

This Normal has behaved as it’s pleased for decades, reshaping and reforming itself after every movement, every valiant attempt at change. But Normal comes back every time— evolving into a smarter, stealthier version of injustice.

And now it’s this Normal’s fault that too many young innocent black men have been killed.

It’s this Normal’s fault that thousands have been wrongfully subjected to the amalgamation of humiliation, violence, and trauma we call the American prison system. 

It’s this Normal’s fault that instead of holding those enforcing and permitting these injustices accountable, we find reasons to broadcast the culpability of the victims.

And the problem is that these consequences of a system shattered from the start, the effects of this Normal are ordinary, and have been for so long.

Why? 

Because this Normal, we know.

This Normal is comfortable.

This Normal is a familiar guilty pleasure we never deny— the guilt of inaction never outweighing the ultimate pleasure of returning to what we know.

But we need to realize that this very comfort is a luxury. Because for so many, normal means prejudice, discrimination, injustice. 

Normal means constant fear, gnawing mercilessly at our hearts every time another name is painstakingly stitched into the patchwork quilt of 

                              black 

                                       lives 

                                               lost.

Our Normal is quiet.

Our Normal is silence. 

Say no to this Normal. 

Instead of perpetuating it, say no to this Normal.

Say no to these weights, 50 kgs each labelled hatred, labelled systemic injustice, labelled racism.

Say no to these norms that like iron manacles have weighed down too many for too long. 

Oppressive kilograms upon kilograms trying to suppress the voices that need to be heard the most.

Not only that, but actively resist its clutching grasp, its infiltration of your principles by shielding and arming yourself 

With the abnormal, the uncomfortable. 

With the Recognition that things need to change. 

With the knowledge you need to create that change.

Say their names, over and over until that becomes the new normal.

Then, for once, let that new normal be decidedly, unquestionably better than the one we leave behind.