THE URGENCY OF THE NORMAL
May 25, 2020. A friend from another country writes to me and asks how things are in California these days. I reply: “Things are much better in terms of the number of infections and daily deaths compared to about two months ago. These have been diminished in large part by the tight control imposed by the state government and that of the cities and counties. Now a cautious opening has begun, which doesn't really seem that cautious. You see traffic on freeways and streets almost like a “normal” day before quarantine. Many drive fast and impatient, as if these months had barely stirred spirits and produced no fundamental changes. In a society like this, where savage capitalism and consumerism define the ethos / pathos of a good part of the population, it is unlikely to see changes in a relatively short period of time. There is an urgent need to reactivate the economy in the country, to continue at the usual pace of life, where those with economic and political power resist the changes required to create a more just and equal society and, of course, to manage (and perhaps avoid) the next epidemics to come. It is still too early to predict the true impact of this crisis created by our own greed and by the indescribable looting, violence and extermination to which we subject animals and the environment in general.
“We are abnormal. But we don't realize it. So we think about going back to normal. What we need is to become truly abnormal and start building another possible world, another society, another way of being and existing. But we have not yet learned how to do it and perhaps we will never learn how to do it. Or perhaps a few will learn one or two lessons that will represent some change, small but hopeful. Life is also made of those small big changes, isn't it? For now, my friend, we are still dominated by our most primitive impulses and with the desire to continue installed in this self-destructive whirlpool.”
LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVES.
I recommend this novel by the Mexican author Valeria Luiselli. A story close to our reality, including the sounds and voices of which we are populated, the thousands of immigrant children persecuted on the southern border of the United States, the ever-present past of the genocide of indigenous peoples, and in the midst of everything, the family that narrates its own version of the chaos and desintegration as it moves from north to south and diagonally across the vast territory of this country.