April 2020
'Twas Just Before Dawn in the Land of Freedom (An Op-Ed) by Raoul Kingsley III
One April morning, I awoke and ventured outside to the conversational sounds of the owls in my small-town neck of the woods. Elsewhere, there might be wind instruments being walked down the otherwise empty urban streets and played inspirationally. While still elsewhere, a ventilator isn’t enough to keep someone breathing. We, as a nation, have left ‘normal’ behind us in the sand like a hermit crab abandons a soda can, venturing forward towards whatever better-suited comforts we can hope for and out into the dangers of the unknown. What ‘new normal’ do we think we’re evolving into? ‘Normal’, in this context, is the theory of a nearly ubiquitous routine experience shared within a culture. So, ya, the new normal will surely include that the sun will rise in the morning, and that’s about it. Whether the clouds deny us sight of it or not, the sun will gift us daylight until it has expired its own celestial longevity. And then, too, will we be faced (a dozen or so hours later) with nightfall and a sense of darkness. But here in America, we have become splintered from the conceptual normal experience in part by how this crisis has bloomed: the widely varying shades of our reaction to it. GessoMagazine.com
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Gesso Magazine
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