Nut cases we have with us always.
Normal human behavior is a social construct.
The fact is that individual human behavior
is a hornet's nest of buzzing madness.
Had there been a creator, with even a vague notion
of what it was human life was intended to be,
we might all be more-or-less normal. We aren't.
We always have some very bright people, and some
who are lucky to be able to hold a job. Tall, short,
nervous, happy, weird, psychotic, depressed,
ambitious, lazy, reasonable, nut-cases, and prophets.
When things are fairly stable, we adjust to what we are
and find work, form schools, elect representatives,
and invite our friends over to watch the football game.
It is when we are afraid and anxious that the semblance
of normalcy comes undone. We are in such a time.
We have been in times like this before, not long since.
For instance, after World War II, having emerged scarred
from holocausts and fire bombings and death in the mud
both west and east, having seen not only the butchery
of racial and religious and political evils from our enemies,
but the awful, destructive, inventiveness of our own scientists
who melted Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we saw that
nuclear destruction was not a private possession.
Groups like the John Birch Society, and our own politicians
like Joseph McCarthy, and millions of other scared and
anxious people simply lost it, and ran scared and crazed.
They saw communists everywhere, under the bed, in Congress,
and in universities. Our socially constructed sense of
being normal unraveled, and the madmen shouted.
It is happening now, too. In the last years of the Bush
administration, not world wars, but economic crime,
and religious and cultural hatred, in 9/11, in the criminal
piracy of the banks and stock markets, in lashing out at Iraq
because we could not corner Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan,
in watching jobs migrate in a global economy, watching
the enormous migration of human populations to old,
settled industrialized countries, while packing up the machinery
from old steel mills, and automobile factories and sending
it overseas, buying German and Japanese and Korean cars,
and talking to repair specialists in India to understand
the computers made in Japan and China, and losing
our homes and jobs, the anxiety has come, again,
together with the madness that is always there, but covered.
It is anxiety, deep, almost unfocused anxiety, over
changes in our whole global human community, that
makes Michele Bachmann say that we have unamericans
in Congress, that makes Christine O'Donnell, for whom
witchcraft was once an option, as was casting out demons
for Sarah Palin in Wasilla, and a general hatred of paying
taxes and being responsible for each other that puts us
so much in danger. We are watching irrationality.
It rests on anxiety. The crazies come out.
That also means that we are in a time of enormous change,
and that what used to be is going away. What is new
is not yet clear, and will take time to become the new normal.
Normal human behavior is a social construct.
The fact is that individual human behavior
is a hornet's nest of buzzing madness.
Had there been a creator, with even a vague notion
of what it was human life was intended to be,
we might all be more-or-less normal. We aren't.
We always have some very bright people, and some
who are lucky to be able to hold a job. Tall, short,
nervous, happy, weird, psychotic, depressed,
ambitious, lazy, reasonable, nut-cases, and prophets.
When things are fairly stable, we adjust to what we are
and find work, form schools, elect representatives,
and invite our friends over to watch the football game.
It is when we are afraid and anxious that the semblance
of normalcy comes undone. We are in such a time.
We have been in times like this before, not long since.
For instance, after World War II, having emerged scarred
from holocausts and fire bombings and death in the mud
both west and east, having seen not only the butchery
of racial and religious and political evils from our enemies,
but the awful, destructive, inventiveness of our own scientists
who melted Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we saw that
nuclear destruction was not a private possession.
Groups like the John Birch Society, and our own politicians
like Joseph McCarthy, and millions of other scared and
anxious people simply lost it, and ran scared and crazed.
They saw communists everywhere, under the bed, in Congress,
and in universities. Our socially constructed sense of
being normal unraveled, and the madmen shouted.
It is happening now, too. In the last years of the Bush
administration, not world wars, but economic crime,
and religious and cultural hatred, in 9/11, in the criminal
piracy of the banks and stock markets, in lashing out at Iraq
because we could not corner Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan,
in watching jobs migrate in a global economy, watching
the enormous migration of human populations to old,
settled industrialized countries, while packing up the machinery
from old steel mills, and automobile factories and sending
it overseas, buying German and Japanese and Korean cars,
and talking to repair specialists in India to understand
the computers made in Japan and China, and losing
our homes and jobs, the anxiety has come, again,
together with the madness that is always there, but covered.
It is anxiety, deep, almost unfocused anxiety, over
changes in our whole global human community, that
makes Michele Bachmann say that we have unamericans
in Congress, that makes Christine O'Donnell, for whom
witchcraft was once an option, as was casting out demons
for Sarah Palin in Wasilla, and a general hatred of paying
taxes and being responsible for each other that puts us
so much in danger. We are watching irrationality.
It rests on anxiety. The crazies come out.
That also means that we are in a time of enormous change,
and that what used to be is going away. What is new
is not yet clear, and will take time to become the new normal.
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