Column

No One Should Want a Return to Normalcy

A return to safety? Sure. But things haven’t been ‘normal’ around here for a very long time.

Drew Magary
GEN
Published in
7 min readApr 1, 2020

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A photo of a person holding a tower of toilet paper rolls as they walk down the hallway.
Photo: Justin Paget/Getty Images

II try to save my anger exclusively for the daytime. If I’m angry only while the sun shines, then I can eat my dinner, watch shitty TV to get my mind a foot or two away from thoughts of the coming New Depression, and then go to bed in relative peace. But of course, all it takes is one reminder — from someone else in the house, or from me reflexively opening Twitter and regretting it, or from my mind going astray — for the anger to bare its teeth again.

“[If] we have between 100[,000] and 200,000, we all together have done a very good job.” That was the president on Monday. If you thought the president wouldn’t see this moment as a chance to practice a little bit of indirect genocide, well, then you’re probably one of the lemmings who voted for him and will do so again. There’s no one to stop him. I would tell you to pay attention and be properly outraged. I would tell you to RESIST, indulging in a bit of spiritual Poe Dameron cosplay. But that accomplishes roughly as much as, if not less than, actual cosplay. What is resistance anyway? It means you TRY to fight back. It doesn’t mean that you succeed.

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Drew Magary
GEN
Writer for

Columnist at GEN. Co-founder, Defector. Author of Point B.