I Hope We Never Return to Normal

The ’90s seem to be having a resurgence, and I don’t think that’s an accident.

When the world feels this wired with tension, people reach backward. Toward a decade that felt steadier. Less hostile. Less combustible. A time before every headline arrived already vibrating with threat. And yes, I loved the whimsigoth magic of the ’90s too — the velvet and candles, the moon phases, the feeling that mystery could exist without fear riding shotgun.

But the version of “normal” many white Americans remember from that era was never the whole story. It was curated. Buffered. Built on distance from harm and distance from history.

While the ’90s were being sold as a time of peace and prosperity, they were also the era of the 1994 Crime Bill. The explosion of mass incarceration. The quiet cementing of Reagan-era economics into permanent inequality. Redlining didn’t end — it evolved. Police budgets ballooned while schools were stripped. “Law and order” became bipartisan code for containment, and whole communities were sacrificed so others could feel secure.

Normal felt calm because the violence was procedural.
It lived in policy and courtrooms and zoning maps and sentencing guidelines.

And because it didn’t touch everyone equally, it was easy for a lot of people not to notice it at all.

That’s why the moment we’re living in now feels shocking to some and familiar to others.

For the oppressed, this isn’t a new reality.
It’s the same one — just louder, less polite, harder to ignore.

History tells this story over and over. After Reconstruction, when Black Americans gained political ground, the response wasn’t integration — it was Jim Crow. When labor movements threatened corporate dominance in the early 20th century, workers were met with strikebreaking and bloodshed, not compromise. When the Civil Rights Movement forced the country to look at itself, the backlash arrived through voter suppression, mass surveillance, and a carceral system designed to replace the old hierarchies with new ones.

Normal has never meant just.
It has meant managed.

Managed anger.
Managed bodies.
Managed truth.

So when people say they want to return to normal, I don’t hear cruelty. I hear exhaustion. I hear longing for a time when awareness didn’t feel so heavy, when believing the system was fair didn’t require so much mental gymnastics.

But that kind of normal depends on forgetting. And forgetting has always been a privilege.

Every real shift this country has ever made has come from refusal, not reassurance. From people staying engaged long after it stopped being comfortable or popular. From sustained pressure that made it impossible for those in power to pretend nothing was wrong.

That’s why I don’t believe the unrest we’re seeing now is proof that everything is collapsing. I think it’s proof that too many people see too clearly to accept the old bargains anymore.

What gives me hope isn’t the noise…
it’s the persistence.

I hope this generation, and the ones coming up behind it, learn that civic engagement isn’t something you do once every few years when things get scary. I hope it becomes normal to know who represents you, to call them regularly, to understand that democracy isn’t a ceremony — it’s upkeep.

I hope people learn, through lived experience, that pressure works. That systems respond when we don’t disengage. That the myth of powerlessness cracks the moment you watch something bend.

And I hope this moment forces a reckoning we don’t rush past.

I hope the violence that has finally breached certain bubbles makes it impossible to pretend that injustice is rare or accidental. I hope we refuse to go back to a version of normal where Black, Brown, and Indigenous lives are treated as acceptable ensurements for stability. I hope equality stops being something we gesture toward and becomes something we demand — fully, consistently, without qualification.

I hope that once people learn what collective power actually does, they start to ask for more.

Safer schools instead of thoughts and prayers.
Gun reform rooted in care instead of fear.
An economy that doesn’t reward hoarding while punishing survival.
A tax system where the wealthiest finally pay their share.
Politics disentangled from corporate money so governance can belong to people again.

These aren’t fantasies. They’re choices we’ve been told not to imagine too clearly.

And I hope we don’t forget what this moment taught us — that silence is a decision, that disengagement serves the status quo, and that comfort has never been a neutral value.

I don’t want to return to normal.

Normal required too many people to absorb harm quietly.
Normal depended on selective blindness.
Normal asked us to confuse calm with justice.

I want us to move forward awake. Willing to stay involved even when it’s tedious and slow and deeply unglamorous. Carrying the lessons we paid for dearly instead of rushing to forget them.

The past is dark. It needs to be.
Not so we can live there —
but so we don’t rebuild it and call it peace.

We’re seeing the darkness together now, and maybe that’s the point — so we can move toward a brighter future together too, one where every one of us gets to stand in the sun.