When Will Things Get Back to Normal? Mickey Z.

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Photo credit: Mickey Z.

Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

July 2, 2020

This article is an update, a “re-set,” if you will…

Preamble: On the liner notes for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album, it’s explained that the song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was written during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. “A desperate kind of song,” Dylan called it. “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs, so I put all I could into this one.”

This is a “desperate kind of article.”

Prologue: In the excellent 1998 German film Run Lola Run, the female protagonist is magically given three chances to cope with a dodgy situation. Like having a reset button on a video game or computer, if Lola screws up, she gets to go back and start from the beginning (hold that thought).





I’ve been writing this article since September 14, 2001.

The F-16s had finally stopped circling overhead in NYC. There were people on my block holding candles, waving flags, and singing the National Anthem as an SUV cruised by with the words “Nuke ’em” soaped onto its rear window. My neighbors were craving normalcy. Even with the severity of the World Trade Center attacks so nearby, the ultimate goal was always normalcy.

Despite the lingering fear, sorrow, doubt, and anger, we waited breathlessly for the authorities to assure us: “Don’t worry. Things were bad but now, we’ve got everything back to normal.”

How many people in late 2001 were asking, what is normal in the capitalist, white supremacist, homophobic patriarchy we call America?

For example, the New York Stock Exchange was shut down by the 9/11 attacks. Once things returned to normal, Wall Street went back to making decisions that wreak havoc upon the large majority of life across the globe. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent of Americans carried on owning wealth equal to the bottom 95 percent (yes, I wrote that 10 years before Occupy Wall Street was a thing).

That’s normal.

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https://worldnewstrust.com/when-will-things-get-back-to-normal-mickey-z

[KPN]

1. Great read. Thanks for posting.