Resist Nostalgia

 After the second deadliest school shooting in US history, FB reminded me of a post I wrote a year ago on this day. From 2021...

I want some of my life back, but I don’t want to go back to normal. I was talking to a creative who is battling her boss’s attempts to lure/cajole/threaten employees back into the office with a resumption of 8 hr work days and one hour commutes. There is strong resistance to this. Most of her coworkers have moved to less congested areas, work from home, have less stress, and are as productive as before. The creative said that the demands were old ‘normal’ thinking and restrictive and silly. She said it just felt like a managerial power move to say ‘back to the normal grind.’ Customer service employers are now getting pushback from job applicants because they are demanding to know how much they’ll be paid and if they can live off it. Can you imagine? The audacity of wanting to be able to LIVE off a full time job?!? Employers are trying to crack down and keep poverty wages of the old normal. My dad passed away in January and you know what we didn’t get? A $10k bill from the hospital or a ‘death fee’ or a ‘funeral home ambulance transfer fee.’ He passed away at home in his own bed of natural causes...relaxed. The hospitals were crowded with covid but now that things are returning to normal they want that ‘death money’ so they can run up charges on grieving families. Healthcare should be free. It shouldn’t cause stress, depression, anger, and bankruptcy. The old normal was filled with mass shootings, school shootings, healthcare bankruptcy, poverty wages, and pyramid scheme capitalism. In the arts, the old normal was rife with abuse, sexual predators, and inequalities in race/class/gender/age. We tolerated this because we expected nothing. Now we know better. Don’t let them buffalo you with that ‘now you can hug your mema’ hype so you can be back in the bullshit. There are specific cultural moment in our lives where things could change for the better for the worse. Most of the time it’s for the worse. 9/11 was one of those shifting moments, and we let them use it to militarized our lives, our security in our police force. 2020 was painful but it opened a door to ‘a new’ way. Don’t let them close it.