Normal

Louisiana Delta, May 27, 2010 (Photo: UPI / Joshua Drake - BP)

"I have anxiety attacks," said Sarah Rigaud, owner of Sarah's Restaurant in Grand Isle, La., where the public beach was closed ... "Every day I pray that something happens, that it will be stopped and everybody can get back to normal."

Since the late summer of 2008, the world's economy has been wounded, drifting, waiting for the next set of shocks to push it over an edge. Approximately 22 million people in the United States are unemployed; millions of jobs have been lost and may never reappear. The Barons of Wall Street are even richer than before. Regulation? Feh.

Our politics consist of Humanists, and fundamentalist True Believers. Centrist and Progressive Democrats who supported Obama (who then turned out not to be a Progressive himself) on the one hand, and on the other, people who talk like crazy schizophrenic mumblers you avoid on the street and mix faith in some idea of god with politics like their whiskey and water.



Things are more, not less, polarized. And, like the Taliban elsewhere, the crazies have guns and are showing more and more that they aren't afraid of using them. They also have large media operations spewing craziness -- lies, jumbled conspiracy theories and half-truth misinformation -- to the Faithful, 24 X 7.

A large oil company created the largest man-made oil spill in the history of our species, and tried to downplay the amount of oil gushing into the Gulf.

It also appears that the Department of the Interior during the Go-Go, "Lil Boots" Bush years was just another cheap whore for the Oil Lobby to play with. And, our current President doesn't appear to know how to cope with Big Oil, or deal with the consequences. Regulation? Feh again.

An in all these things, the peasantry -- that would be everyone down here in the Trench -- keep saying along with Sarah Rigaud that We just want things to go back to normal. We just don't want to feel frightened all the time.

That's a natural response to rapid change -- but the 'normal' we used to know is gone. The world at least half of us grew up in; the world before 9-11 and Lil' Boots' Unnecessary War, and all the rest, is gone.

The more change, the more fear; the more lies and mumbled craziness flooding over the airwaves, the greater the chance that (like some Middle Europeans in the late 1920's), the peasantry will begin to yearn for someone, anyone, who can claim to make the merry-go-round stop.

My fear is that our future will be determined by ideologically-driven purists carrying a bible, promising that everything will go back to being as it was. Europe and Asia have experienced religiously-driven repression, but not in America's history. And I'm afraid that's what's going to happen.

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