Normal Is Because We Made It So
Today in New York, a number of men took to a podium and spoke to ‘the world.’ For the most part, they spoke to their own country, their political future front of mind.
The institution was created with good intent. Yet it has become a spineless parody surrounded by states led by men who only care for themselves. Its spine is broken, its heart on life support.
How else could a room of people sit and listen to a man speak about wiping an entire state and its citizens off the earth? As if this is normal?
This act alone- the total acceptance of it as normal, sanctioned, allowed- speaks to the place our world has reached.
Normal is genocide, life streamed. Normal is the threat to eradicate millions of people. Normal is sweeping into another country in the night and taking its president, then requisitioning all the oil, quite probably to enrich a few.
We do not arrive at this type of numbed-out normal over a weekend. It happens, slowly, quietly, over decades. Little Atrocities allowed. The systems are encoded to privilege the few at the cost of the many. The few believe they have the superior rights, through their gender, skin colour, status and intelligence, to be in the positions of power. As the minority, acting in a democracy, they need to convince the majority that they are the ones who can lead. They do this through the winning tropes of fear and scarcity, pointing to the ‘other’ as the threat. Hatred is the weapon.
And then they turn the sword upon those who elected them.
Add to this the endless streams of drama in our feeds. Flooding the zone.
So many that it is impossible for any one human to stay focused on one drama.
The result: an audience of delegates sits quietly and listens to a man, vested with obscene power, speak of acts of evil. Normal.
Silence is no longer optional.
Rage. Speak. Call it out. Name.
The tide is turning. Those early speakers and protestors who have paid the price of their jobs, platforms and safety have paved the path, as early activists always do, for the rest of us. There is still a price to be paid, but when there are too many voices, too many protesters, too many walkouts, boycotts, a movement swells.
To sit silently in a room while a vacuous man spews violence is to be complicit. ‘Normal’ is because we made it so.
Stewardship means we do not accept the unacceptable as normal.
Published September 23rd 2026. Photo taken September 23rd 2026
