I think I need my vitals checked, because the news doesn’t make my heart monitor spike like it should. Like it used to. Death and destruction don’t make me flinch as readily as one might imagine of the tender.
Getting a Twitter notification on missile strikes has come to carry about the same immediate gravity as a Snapchat from a friend.
Not to say that I don’t care, because I care ferociously, but that is, it isn’t surprising. A devastating headline appears about as ordinary as any other message on my phone, because it’s become so normal. So everyday.
I feel like we’re missing out on a vital part of our humanity, a vital organ partially missing where a heart should beat. Now, humanity isn’t heartless yet. There is much good in the world, and I believe in this goodness fiercely.
But what’s normal to the world pains my heart. What’s normal is far from goodness.
Another bomb, another attack, another scandal, another trial, another loss of life, another hateful blow, another war.
My phone lights up, another story. A tragedy is just a notification. Ordinary headlines exist that don’t make the news, parts of daily living that don’t make us blink.
Another person shivers, frozen, without a home, another cardboard sign as their heart’s only hope.
Another spitefully subtle slur goes unacknowledged.
Another man is sentenced to death.
Another woman treated like a thing, then shamed for her own objectification.
Another is incarcerated for the color of their skin.
Another match lights a fire.
Another human being made to feel less than human.
I think perhaps our heart has been layered by tragedy, so that each time the world’s pain hurt us, we taught it to hide. The first blow might have shattered something, the next might have led to some splintering. But then, as time went on, as bomb after bomb exploded, as bullet after bullet fired, as tear after tear fell, another brick was added to a growing wall of apathy. We’ve hit a rock bottom, the bottom being a normalcy that rolls with the punches of human affliction.
News flash: this isn’t normal. Normal should not exist this way. Some might say that pain is inevitable, that violence is unavoidable, that war is necessary, that this is the way things are. I say that’s bullshit.
What’s normal is excruciatingly abnormal. Normal has become awful. Normal is complacency. Normal is bloodshed. Normal is pain. Normal is suffering at the hands of our sacred earth-mates. The world snatches little bits of humanity away from our beings with daily occurrences that look a heck of a lot like hell on earth. I’m here, in the snuggles of my covers, in the comfort of my privilege, but there’s a war on humanity waging itself out there.
Indeed, this is the way things are. They didn’t have to be, but this is now, and now really needs an attitude lift, a redefinition of what is normal. Because this shouldn’t be it.
