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Finding out our new norms
We are all looking for normal. We all want normal back. And we often hear people talk about the “new normal”. And I think we can all agree, there will be a new normal. Much like after Y2K, 9-11, the 2008 Crash, and now COVID, with each of these events life and things changed in certain ways forever. The #1 way I believe things will change with a new normal will be sanitation practices will be improved and much more strict in several ways, and businesses and facilities.
Those things are the tangible new normal. But I think the #1 reason we all want normal back is for the intangible mental state reason. We are getting back into the “known” with less unknown, but there is still much unknown. The unknown produces uncertainty, uncertainty creates doubt, doubt creates suspicions, and suspicion creates pessimism. All of these words are simple words, yet words the destroy, destruct, and hold no constructive power for the unknown of the future.
Many things may be in doubt or unknown, but many things are known and certain. And to me, the new normal I hope for many individuals is the new normal of “turning off all media” for 23.5 hours a day, and only allowing any sort of media to occupy only 0.5 hours of your mental well being a day. I also hope and dream of a day when individuals can have a more balanced, constructive mental state in which they share on media platforms vs the negative and pessimistic state those folks live and breathe in daily.
There continues to be and likely always will be senseless destructive media reports and posts, individual destructive posts. I responded to a post on a media outlet about “meat” on Sunday, in which some senseless person commented with a quick snap of the brain likely not understanding the damaging power her comment had. And as I stated, “the damage done by these sorts of posts is tragic. Reputations get destroyed every minute by media and it is viscerally painful to observe.
Do you know why this is so important? Because post COVID, our local economy tax base will show to have been eroded severely. Spending locally has dropped to our lowest levels of all time with population and inflation adjustments. I am gravely concerned the largest winner of this pandemic is Jeff Bezos, and if we are to gain our local economies back, we will need to band together as brothers and sisters to be constructive, optimistic, and intentional about keeping our local communities and economies alive. The new normal has pushed people to not support local economies. The new normal isn’t playing favor to towns less than 50,000 in population. And we must embrace this reality so we can reverse this potential outcome.
Our new intentional normal is to “delete” the destructive posts, reports, comments, and people. People in my inner circle have heard me talk about “stupid people”. That term is very negative and some even would say hateful. My definition of “stupid people” is “the people blasting their voices through media, posts, comments, etc that are ignorant, reactive, negative, pessimistic, loud, don’t know what they don’t know (which is extremely dangerous by the way), uninformed, drama-filled, crazy looking to spread crazy, pot stirrers, gossips, etc that look to spread their non-constructive and even destructive inherent character across the population, all the while not looking to provide any physical and mental work or exertion towards providing solutions for growth or changes. Simply looking to open their mouth or type, that’s it. Never do anything but move their lips and lift a finger or two to type.
My dream of a new norm is to “delete” these people from influence and conversations because they provide no path forward, no help, no solutions, no intentional constructive advice. I’m no intellectual, but they certainly don’t even provide any powerful intellect of which is most often useless without work clothes on it. Our new normal doesn’t have to be just about sanitation! Our new normal needs to be about how do we save our more rural local communities!? And we darn sure don’t do it by destruction from within or by those that have left us for “greener pastures” and try to still destroy from the external! From Leoti, KS, to Lewis, KS, to Hays, KS, to Great Bend, KS and all those in between, we will need to band together to “delete” those and the information that isn’t providing solutions to our every day problems. Technologies are great, but “stupid people” are not helping us, and technology in COVID is pushing our economy further away from us! We need to find our own new norms!
