Is the 'new normal', normal?

We explore the benefits of a recalibration.

Sister Mary Elephant: Alright class… class? Alright Class! Shuuuuut Uuuuuup!
(Look up Sister Mary Elephant, from the days when comedy was still funny.)

Today we are in a giant classroom. We are here to discover why it is necessary to recalibrate what is ‘normal’. Anarchists believe ‘the sky is the limit!’ The rest of us have settled into three distinct tribes. First, the Progressives, they allow for infinite change, and are willing to accept any concept offered to them; all identities welcome, all progressive identities, that is!

Then there is the ‘Independent’ tribe that sits back and watches. They reserve opinion and consider both of the others’ hesitantly going one way or the other, with no permanent bias, because if they do show some, they leave this tribe and become a new member of the one they now favor! LOL This keeps this group pure, if for no other reason, by definition!

The final tribe is the ‘Traditionalists’. They are most interested in recalibrating ‘normal’. The group has a sensitivity toward change, not totally against it, but gives it the ‘stink-eye’ before even considering going there! These people have living standards that believe we all need to develop a form of self-reliance. Their idea of a good government is one that keeps up the roads, keeps all of us safe from enemies, both foreign and domestic, and only offers those vital services, but otherwise stays out of their way.

As you can imagine the Progs and the Trads are ‘oil and water’! Those Progs have been playing a game of two steps backward, and one step forward, appeasing the Trads while moving their progressive agenda ‘forward’ but by Trads’ standards, moving us backwards, away from traditional normality! Notably, this has been going on for over one hundred years. Did you know even the poorest commonly dressed up in their ‘Sunday-go-to-meeting’ attire and all went to church. All families had a mother, and a father, with the only exception being if one or both passed away!

If the Southern Democrats had shown love and respect, those minorities would have gladly taken spaces along sides with the more fortunate, and climbed out of the pit they were in. England is a great example of what we could have accomplished in race relations with less prejudice, but they are way off the mark in personal freedom and common sense mental health standards.

We were so close to unification, all of us, as Americans. Okay, that did not happen! What did happen was a hurried, and poorly worded ‘Civil Rights Act’ that would be misused 60 years later. The Act itself was vital—but its legacy has been stretched in ways its authors never imagined. Misused you ask? How?

In our rush to embrace diversity, we have blurred the line between eccentricity and illness. The Civil Rights Act gave us the language of rights—but not always the tools of discernment. Today, behaviors once flagged for clinical concern are often reframed as lifestyle choices or ‘neurodivergent’ traits. This means that real suffering—delusions, paranoia, crippling anxiety—can be masked by a culture that celebrates difference without asking what it costs us in the daily degradation of our (collective), wellbeing.

There are many reasons that we have gone off the rails for a century, but almost all relate to some ancient standards set thousands of years ago! If we more closely followed those time-tested rules, we would never have gotten to this dystopian world we live in today. Just as inviting in peoples that have no interest in assimilating, encouraging the mentally ill to dictate our daily lifestyles equally blurs our core sanity as a nation, and has brought a cancer that has metastasized on streets in big cities.

Allowing tent communities where these ‘free souls’ can live on busy city streets without even sufficient toilet facilities! If compassion means letting people suffer in public, maybe we need to reassess who’s truly unwell. What is the job of mayor all about, if not for the wellbeing of its ‘citizens’?

Going to the old colloquial ‘poor house’, as my mother often said we were bound, would be far better than having to defecate in public, on the sidewalk! And more obviously denying any compassionate mental treatment facilities, although billions of taxpayer dollars are tossed at the issue.

As I said, none of this ‘alternate reality’ we live in today would have ever formed, if we just stuck to the ancient rule book. Although we may have eclipsed them in tech, they were lightyears ahead in the guidance of what’s best for the human condition. Throwing out their rules was tantamount to leaving the ‘Garden of Eden’. We know it all, and will make our own rules! We stretched the word ‘freedom’ to protect everyone, including those so dangerous to themselves and others that it is nearly impossible to separate them!

We only act after they commit a heinous act such as shooting up a school, burning down a church, assassinating a leader! As we look back into their digital footprint, we can clearly see the dangerous abnormality we ignore and accept as the ‘new normal’.

Until we put the lenses back on government, we have no hope of recalibrating normal. One group enjoys support, (power) from this strange normal, and the other was two-step-backwarded, and-one-step-forwarded right into dystopia! Only those capable of looking back will see the downward trajectory we are on. If you grew up within it, it is your ‘normal’.

Do you wonder why so many kids are so unhappy they find taking their own lives as a solution? Maybe they expected a better ‘normal’ than we have made for them?

I have no doubt had we followed those simple guidelines laid down over a thousand years ago, suicides would be rare, the only tents would be in forests, school shootings would only be from their video production classes, and the only burning in a church would be in a story about a special bush.

Sister Mary Elephant: Class dismissed. But if we don’t recalibrate soon, the next lesson might be taught in our country’s ashes. Next week we explore those thousand-year-old rules.