Sub Terra Vita Chronicle #42: Questing for Normalcy—Allowing Change to Happen

Sub Terra Vita

By Tim Krenz

April 4, 2016

Chronicle #42: Questing for Normalcy—Allowing Change to Happen

Part I: The whole world sits at the threshold of some of the greatest and most difficult changes. The change does not mean the end of history. It does not mean the beginning of the end of humanity, nor hardly even “the end of the beginning,” to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill. Our country as a true union of common purpose, and our community of Osceola itself, confront a new challenge of how to use the technology available now and that which will come soon.

The new tools in our hands already can transform before our vision the world we think we see, literally. It can define our future and destroy the urge of our worse instincts, and it should create better worlds by keeping the good character of faithful saints fulfilled.

The bad things, human greed and fear, we can surely dampen and limit to our overall benefit. We can also creatively absorb the advantages that the sciences have given and will provide for us. The best things, to love thy neighbor as thyself, and the strong individual character to find wiser solutions in the logic of practical reasoning, all could advance our ethical use of the tools at the fingertips.

The normalcy at present, and possibly about to fade, has inter-connected parts. The politics now uses more technology and statistical modeling than ever before in history. The very nature of labor and work, and the expectations of producers and consumers, change faster with the new technology than we have ever known. People's social times now use the non-described “DEVICE” as much as people used to wonder and think about people and things they did not know or did not understand. These changes, however, have not yet become permanent because culturally in how people identify themselves and relate to others remains normal to the core constructs of life in Osceola, Wisconsin.

A century ago, the great changes in the world more or less began in heavy doses and quick succession. World wars, national and ideological revolutions and de-evolutions, globalized finance and trade, and abundant energy, all came together to define the rest of the 20^th Century. Even the educational revolution that arrived later, and the social evolutions of the late 1960s and 1970s merely added to the consistency of the century, instead of radically changing the permanent nature of the culture.

The cultural normalcy relates directly to life in the St. Croix Valley. First, bloodlines and ancestry and relations of non-traditional households describe how people refer to their family, still a predominate feature of the Valley. Second, work still uses some description of money to regulate the exchange of property, in an economy overwhelmingly carbon-fueled. In the Valley, this economic system goes back to farming and the business exchanges with the Twin Cities in Minnesota.

Third, people, rightly or wrongly and without judgment, still determine their social identities, social time, social associations, friendships, and even the choice of their spouse, based in a great part on their religious or philosophical beliefs, or lack thereof. In the valley, the various immigrant families and their established churches in each others' proximity have allowed a more diverse and tolerant community than other parts of the world, the country, or even in the state of Wisconsin.

Finally, almost every person lives somewhere near a community for companionship, work, supply, and entertainment. In the valley, the proximity connected many communities in such things as a competition between schools, in sports, arts and academics, etc.

The Valley has consistently maintained these cultural constructs over the past century. All I have described, even if in dispute, I consider absolute goods upon which to build a better world, here. In the next chronicle, I will examine how the changes through technology might come, and how people can evaluate it, and keep and refresh the new and better normalcy possible.