Sub Terra Vita Chronicle #38: Questing for Normalcy: Terms on Community

Sub Terra Vita

By Tim Krenz

March 7, 2016

Chronicle #38: Questing for Normalcy: Terms on Community

A quest implies a search to discover something rare and precious. In this quest for the more normal things—the everyday, the simple, the plain vanilla—we can go the next lap and seek to understand the “normalcy” of something a community would like to attain as a condition of existence. This condition can provide for a stable, regular, and enduring foundation of values as to how we do things, or how we expect things to happen within some template of “regular living.”

By default, cultures sometimes can only define the conventions of normal by recognizing the opposite, or rather those things NOT normal. We may not fully realize it, but “average” in a statistical set has a close association to “normal.” Above average; not normal. Below average; not normal. Neither of those two types of average has anything inherently good or bad in them. People just define them as not normal if not of the average in the middle of statistics. It gets worse. Normal's true opposite, “abnormal,” means, in the clinical sense, “NOT a good thing.”

Like everything in writing, science, social studies, medicine, law, philosophy and even in the mundane topic of weather, much of the reality we know depends on how people define the terms in use within the conversation . How people define terms—or eliminate, discard, abuse or ignore the terms—will determine to a great extent the relationships between individual people or in larger groups and communities.

To define the terms of “normalcy,” for our purpose here, what does “normalcy” as a purpose or condition offer life in Osceola? In the greater St. Croix Valley? Or elsewhere in the world?

Normalcy does not mean blindness to injustice or wrong, but normalcy does mean a certain freedom to do one's part to better their life, and make it healthier, understandable, and prosperous. Normalcy does not provide license to disrespect anyone's person, their beliefs, styles, work or self-worth. It does, however, demand an attitude of open-mindedness toward new things and different people. Normalcy even asks for healthy agreement to disagree, and then to leave matters of pure opinion alone.

Normalcy does not condone neighbors to take opposite sides of an issue to the physical or moral detriment of the “community-of-all.” Normalcy needs to find a common point of agreement and work for some better solutions from there—for all concerned. Normalcy cannot offer a truly free lunch for everyone. Yet, normalcy in a community intends that families can feed themselves. A person can even choose to buy that “free lunch” for others. Also, normalcy in our area has a community organization feast or a church dinner after fall harvest or at holiday time—where things of normalcy gel into better understanding.

Normalcy does not mean holding on to old ways, by forcefully clawing them to shreds. That only destroys the value of their benefit to us. Normalcy honors things and people who knew it the way before now. Normalcy then getstheir insight, wisdom, and their simple experience of times before, to help the present generation understand new things, etc. Old and new helps the old and new work better together, and to the benefit of the present and future people who use it.

The rest of the world can always dissolve its strengths into a fury of ideology, conflict, worry and fear, all of which will consume the world which embraces those negative, abnormal impulses of human greed and fear. A community—anywhere—at its basic best can always survive upheavals elsewhere. I expect every community to do so, if it can understand the “normalcy” all desire as common to innate good natures. We have a common goal, in Osceola, as people have everywhere—to thrive, and to exceed the limits placed on people, those limits started when humanity divided itself.