{"id":18655,"date":"2017-01-21T09:52:31","date_gmt":"2017-01-21T14:52:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=18655"},"modified":"2017-01-21T10:05:16","modified_gmt":"2017-01-21T15:05:16","slug":"the-not-new-not-normal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2017\/01\/21\/the-not-new-not-normal\/","title":{"rendered":"The (not) new (not) normal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Flying<\/a>

Flying pig. Image: Morton Devonshire<\/a>, Creative Commons, some rights reserved<\/p><\/div>\n

Cat videos, binge-watching comfortable reruns, muting the news: I get it. It’s been a brutal political year, and after the end of it, the federal government is in for what appears to be the sharpest change in political direction within recent memory.<\/p>\n

No one knows what’s going to happen, but half the country preemptively disapproves. And exactly the same would still be true if the results had gone the other way.<\/p>\n

When faced with uncertainty and with rapid change, our least helpful emotions emerge: anger, fear, anxiety. Least helpful because anger tends to knock fifty points off the IQ, because fear leads some to timidity and others\u00a0to recklessness, and anxiety because it leads to paralysis and withdrawal.<\/p>\n

The biggest hazard at a time like this may be to just get used to it, to declare an era marked by competing apocalyptic pronouncements, fungible facts, and bubbles of mutually exclusive understanding the new normal and proceed as usual. As segregation and apartheid became “just how we do things here,” as forced collectivization became “modern Soviet agriculture,” as grinding poverty became a routine\u00a0consequence of the “natural order.”<\/p>\n

Unsettled times are painful. The strong temptation is to disengage, to quit the public sphere for the private and hunker down. I get it. I suspect that’s exactly how the times get<\/em> unsettled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cat videos, binge-watching comfortable reruns, muting the news: I get it. It’s been a brutal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18655"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18655"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18660,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18655\/revisions\/18660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}