It's been five or six months since the term "new normality" somehow slipped into our vocabulary and language.
Originating from SF author Robert A. Heinlein, who first used his "new normal" in the novel "Luna is a Cruel Mistress", this new normal term was also used to describe how people will live after the global financial crisis of 2008. Well, here is that complex neologism even now, in the times of Kovid, when nothing at all seems normal: "new normality" is offered as a kind of global certificate, which is issued to everyone who is abnormal, so that we can more easily accept it as the way we will live in the future, without the possibility of ever going back to the old way. Uh, that sounds kind of familiar.
Let's take a look at some of the old normalities here. For example, it was normal for young people to vote for the future of the country with their hands and pencils, not with their feet and work permits in Germany. Or that it was normal for elections to be used for people to express their opinion about the character of the government - and not about the need for the opposition to disappear. It was also normal for the media to give space to both sides in a dispute; to ask more than just one person about everything; that the present is not the best in modern history; that a better future is not something that is announced for the second, at most the third time, to come in two, at most three years. So, normal. Once upon a time. Or at least it could have been, but it wasn't. Rather, there is this "new normal". In which we have been living for an undefined long time. And certainly long before the "new normal" became a concept with which the whole world is now familiar.
People from these areas are, to put it simply, pioneers of the "new normal", that is, getting used to the worst; to no longer fool ourselves about what the "new normal" actually means. Today's politics, culture, economy, let's name any area of social or state life of this our local or regional environment, are new normalities with which we had to relate with each new war, each new transition or its phase, each new mandate of whatever or whoever the year of the new normal - everything that appeared in front of us swallowing all the old normality. And every normality that could possibly arise comes, and thus helps the "new normal" bypass us.
Residents of developed and (therefore) spoiled countries probably have a hard time bearing the "new normal" because they encounter it either rarely or for the first time. For us here, the "new normal" represents a decades-old normal phenomenon: today we will easily put up with masks, physical distance, avoiding or banning gatherings, quarantine or whatever is the "new normal". Because for us it's just another item on the list of what can't be done now, but was possible before. Or what new bad thing has come, so that something old and good will never come back. The strengthening of radicalism and demagoguery, economic declines, poverty and unemployment as a result of historical stress - all that could befall the frightened developed world within the framework of the "new normal", it is the new normal whooping cough to us, which we have already coughed up so many times. "New normality" is, therefore, something completely normal in the world we live in, and which, here, is becoming the world in which the rest of the world will live. And somehow it seems normal to him that they also get to know it a little. And to take the burden of the new normal off our shoulders. It's more over our heads.
Which is kind of normal.
Bonus video:
