[MCN] Fwd: COVID-19 and the Wasting Disease of Normalcy

Thu Apr 23 12:32:03 EDT 2020

Jim -- can't do a link, but think you might want to read and maybe include
excerpts in the community news.  Ethel

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Voices for Creative Nonviolence <info at vcnv.org>
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2020, 9:00 AM
Subject: COVID-19 and the Wasting Disease of Normalcy
To: <bike4ethel at gmail.com>

The pandemic has brought home what the threats of global destruction by
climate change and nuclear war should have long ago
 *COVID-19 and the Wasting Disease of Normalcy*

*The pandemic has brought home what the threats of global destruction by
climate change and nuclear war should have long ago—that the promises of
normalcy will never deliver in the end.  *
*Daniel Berrigan at Cornell University circa 1970 in Ithaca, New York.
(Photo: PL Gould/IMAGES/Getty Images)*

By Brian Terrell

“But what of the price of peace?” asked Jesuit priest and war resister
Daniel Berrigan, writing from federal prison in 1969, doing time for his
part in the destruction of draft records. “I think of the good, decent,
peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many
of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as
they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm
in the direction of their loved ones, in the direction of their comforts,
their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans -- that
twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent
life and honorable natural demise.”

>From his prison cell in a year of mass movements to end the war in Vietnam
and mobilizations for nuclear disarmament, Daniel Berrigan diagnosed
normalcy as a disease and labeled it an obstacle to peace. “’Of course, let
us have the peace,’ we cry, ‘but at the same time let us have normalcy, let
us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor
ill repute nor disruption of ties.’ And because we must encompass this and
protect that, and because at all costs -- at all costs -- our hopes must
march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a
sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have
woven… because of this we cry peace, peace, and there is no peace.”

Fifty one years later, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the very notion of
normalcy is being questioned as never before. While Donald Trump is
“chomping on the bit” to return the economy to normal very soon based on a
metric in his own head, more reflective voices are saying that a return to
normal, now or even in the future, is an intolerable threat to be resisted.
“There is a lot of talk about returning to ‘normal’ after the COVID-19
outbreak,” says climate activist Greta Thunberg, “but normal was a crisis.”

In recent days even economists with the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund and columnists in the *New York Times* have spoken about the
urgent necessity of reordering economic and political priorities to
something more human- only the thickest and cruelest minds today speak of a
return to normal as a positive outcome.

Early in the pandemic, the Australian journalist John Pilger reminded the
world of the baseline normal that COVID-19 exacerbates: “A pandemic has
been declared, but not for the 24,600 who die every day from unnecessary
starvation, and not for 3,000 children who die every day from preventable
malaria, and not for the 10,000 people who die every day because they are
denied publicly-funded healthcare, and not for the hundreds of Venezuelans
and Iranians who die every day because America's blockade denies them
life-saving medicines, and not for the hundreds of mostly children bombed
or starved to death every day in Yemen, in a war supplied and kept going,
profitably, by America and Britain. Before you panic, consider them.”

I was starting high school when Daniel Berrigan asked his question and at
the time, while there obviously were wars and injustices in the world, it
seemed as though if we did not take them too seriously or protest too
strenuously, the American Dream with its limitless potential was spread
before us. Play the game, and our hopes would “march on schedule” was an
implied promise that in 1969 looked like a sure thing, for us young white
North Americans, anyway. A few years later, I abandoned normal life,
dropped out after a year of college and joined the Catholic Worker movement
where I came under the influence of Daniel Berrigan and Dorothy Day, but
these were privileged choices that I made. I did not reject normalcy
because I did not think that it could deliver on its promise, but because I
wanted something else. As Greta Thunberg and the Friday school strikers for
climate convict my generation, few young people, even from previously
privileged places, come of age today with such confidence in their futures.

The pandemic has brought home what the threats of global destruction by
climate change and nuclear war should have long ago- that the promises of
normalcy will never deliver in the end, that they are lies that lead those
who trust in them to the ruin. Daniel Berrigan saw this a half century ago,
normalcy is an affliction, a wasting disease more dangerous to its victims
and to the planet than any viral plague.

Author and human rights activist Arundhati Roy is one of many who
recognizes the peril and the promise of the moment: “Whatever it is,
coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like
nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for
a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and
refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the
midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the
doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a
return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break
with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is
a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

“Every crisis contains both danger and opportunity,” said Pope Francis
about the present situation. “Today I believe we have to slow down our rate
of production and consumption and to learn to understand and contemplate
the natural world. This is the opportunity for conversion. Yes, I see early
signs of an economy that is less liquid, more human. But let us not lose
our memory once all this is past, let us not file it away and go back to
where we were.”

“There are ways forward we never imagined – at huge cost, with great
suffering – but there are possibilities and I’m immensely hopeful,” said
Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, on Easter. “After so much
suffering, so much heroism from key workers and the NHS (National Health
Service) in this country and their equivalents all across the globe, once
this epidemic is conquered we cannot be content to go back to what was
before as if all was normal. There needs to be a resurrection of our common
life, a new normal, something that links to the old but is different and
more beautiful.”

In these perilous times, it is necessary to use the best social practices
and to wisely apply science and technology to survive the present COVID-19
pandemic. The wasting disease of normalcy, though, is the far greater
existential threat and our survival requires that we meet it with at least
the same courage, generosity and ingenuity.

*Brian Terrell, brian at vcnv.org <brian at vcnv.org>,  is a co-coordinator of
Voices for Creative Nonviolence and is quarantined on a Catholic Worker
farm in Maloy, Iowa*

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