Refuse to Normalize This, America.
Something often happens to people exposed to repeated trauma.
Gradually, they become conditioned to accept the horrors as commonplace. Time and brutality start to wear down their defenses and sap their emotional resources and they begin learn to live alongside the most malignant sickness as if it were ordinary.
Slowly but quite decidedly, they grow numb to the unthinkable cruelty and the sustained violence until it all begins to seem normal. Eventually, even the most compassionate of human beings loses the ability to be outraged or to push back or to even care. Self-preservation can even begin to craft a story in their heads where the most inhumane treatment no longer registers
This is the greatest challenge we face in these terrible days, my friends.
We can’t let this become normal.
Military occupations of American cities is not normal.
Mass deportations are not normal.
A Cabinet filled with billionaires and insurrectionists is not normal.
Hungry children and sick seniors being cut off from aid is not normal.
Massive internment camps are not normal.
Already vulnerable people being preyed upon by our government is not normal.
White Christian nationalism shaping our legislation is not normal.
A President live-posting his sociopathy and mental degradation in real time is not normal.
Good people, we can’t allow ourselves to grow so acclimated to the relentlessness and frequency of the viciousness we are seeing that it no longer turns our stomachs, boils our blood, and pierces our hearts. We can’t let our unbearable fatigue drive us to resignation or apathy.
