Guest column by Alan Lipp: Back to normal?

I’ve been wondering exactly what is this “normal” that everybody wants to return to. Is it the last month before the mandated 6 feet of separation? When I think back a few months I remember a president who was impeached for obstruction of justice. We were warned that wasn’t normal.

Children in cages wasn’t normal either, or banning Muslims, or running a scam university. I’m fairly sure it wasn’t normal for dozens of the president’s appointees to be investigated for abuse of power. I know it was a long time ago, but don’t you remember presidents who supported our allies and decried authoritarian dictators?

It is hard to remember that far back, but I’m fairly sure that previous presidents did not urge voters to support law breakers and pedophiles. But then, our presidents didn’t brag about their sexual prowess, call their opponents out with schoolyard taunts, brag about getting away with sexual harassment. I’ll stop here, the list is far too long. This is not the normal we pray for.

I suspect that for most people, going back to normal just means they can go to work, go to a movie, go to a ball game, and not be bothered by the world. The problem with that “back to normal” is the hidden privilege of thinking there is such a normal to go back to.

A few years ago America was forced to become aware of the daily brutality faced by people of color. Young men and women were killed on the street, or in their cars, or in their homes, for the crime of walking while black, or eating while black, or living while black. I’m guessing that most people of color would prefer not to return to that normal, thank you very much.

And then there were the mass shootings. I haven’t heard of any mass shooting in the U.S. since COVID-19 captured the airways. That makes social distancing almost worthwhile, doesn’t it? But not quite. Many people would be happy to join the bustling throng as long as it wasn’t their school or their theater or their concert that was being shattered by automatic gunfire. It isn’t so bad as long as the problems of the world are far enough away that we can ignore them.

We have always had poverty and homelessness and great inequalities, but as long as it was in China or India or some other place we didn’t really have to think about it. “Let the politicians handle it and don’t bother me,” was a slogan many of us could get behind. If we heard that a woman was raped in Central Park or a child was taken in a mall, we could grieve for their families, tsk-tsk at the inhumanity of it, and then change the channel. But Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby, and Roy Moore, and so many others made it clear that we had a widespread disease of rape, and sexual slavery, and pedophilia — all pandemics without a societal vaccine. But they didn’t affect me, right? I am, after all, an old white male so those aren’t my problems, right?

No, I don’t think that is the normal we want to return to. Perhaps what we yearn for is a bit further back, when children were seen but not heard and when women knew their place was in the kitchen and the bedroom. That normal would probably work well for some, but for most of us, that would be worse than COVID-19.

I’m tired of looking for normal. No matter how far back we go we will find miseries that we are well done with, or at least have made progress on.

But normal doesn’t mean there are social ills I can ignore. I don’t have to think back to my childhood to remember a time — was it just last year? — when most people wanted a better job with better pay and better working conditions, or they wanted to look better. “I can’t stand these wrinkles, or these liver spots, or this hair on my lip, or my left breast is larger than my right.” Last year, some of us drove to work cursing the traffic and our coworkers and our boss. Last year others didn’t have a car or a job. Many had lost a child or a parent to the opioid epidemic. Did anyone want to keep their lives the same, to clutch onto this normal? Or was there a deep yearning for something different, something better.

Our “normal” may have been easier than our isolation, but it embraced a lot of human misery that cut across race and class and gender. If this pandemic has taught us anything it is that we are all part of the human community, and that some of the most vulnerable of us are the ones who put food on our table, who keep us safe by working so that we can stay home.

So here’s an idea: couldn’t we try to find a new normal, one where we try to make room for everyone?

Alan Lipp lives in South Deerfield.