What Do You See...

I remember that when I was taking anatomy in school and I learned about the blind spot in our eyes. I was blown away. We all have a section of our vision that is just being filled in by our brains (I guess technically it all is, but that's a different discussion). The space where the optic nerve connects in the eye there is a spot in our field of vision where no light cells exist. But instead of there being a small spot of nothing when we are looking at the world our brains fill in what is there.

We aren't seeing what we think we are seeing. We have a blind spot.

All of us have blind spots in our reasoning as well. Places where we fill in information that either isn't there or doesn't actually correlate to what is there. Sometimes it's with people we know. Like we have a real blind spot to bad behavior from someone who we love because of all of the things they do that we approve of. Or we have a blind spot to people we don't like doing something good because of all the things they do that we don't approve of. Blind spots work both ways.

What we think should be there is what we decide is there.

Trump and Putin met yesterday in Alaska. A war criminal and a felon just meeting to chit chat about stealing land from Ukraine. Do you remember when Mitt Romney said that Russia was still our enemy and he was roundly mocked? That we had moved on from Russia and the cold war, that we had won so catch up, grandpa. And Romney was like, you aren't paying attention to what is happening. They are still a threat. Putin will always be a threat. Well he was right, everyone else was wrong, but now instead of viewing Putin as the bad guy a large contingent on the right has embraced him as a role model.

What is normal shifted and we didn't see it coming. What we all knew was right made that normalization of Putin just slip into our blind spots. CLEARLY everyone could see what he was, and there was NO way the members of the Republican party of all people would embrace him. And to be fair there are still some members of the party who are baffled by this (not that it's difficult to baffle Lindsey Graham but still).

Putin is the goal now. Oligarchs and religious intolerance and strongman tactics. Trump was so happy to see his handler yesterday that he got distracted and left the meeting minutes on the hotel printer for goodness sake. Of course who knows if it's just that Trump wants to be Putin or if in all the hacking that Russia has done they own a copy of the Epstein files and Trump has no choice but to love on Putin to keep those hidden. I think it's probably a touch of both. I think some of the falling in line of the entire party (parties?) is kompromat and some of it is naked ambition.

Either way what is normal has moved.

Because let's face it, even if you were disgusted that Trump met with Putin on American soil yesterday with no concessions made by Russia, you weren't surprised. You weren't shocked. It was just another day in Trump's America.

We've normalized so much behavior already that it's sort of shocking.

You cannot spend all day every day reacting to the shit show. You have to acknowledge that everything does indeed suck and then pick your poison to fight against. And your method of fighting. Marching in the street. Donating to the people who need help. Writing screeds that can be used to remind people they aren't alone and can be shared with others for the same reasons. Just holding your family close.

And while you are dealing with what you can the rest slowly but surely gets normalized. And we need to fight against that as much as we can while still maintaining our sanity. We need to make sure that we are still sickened when ICE tackles a food delivery guy in DC and beats him while yelling that "liberals have ruined america." We have to to make sure we are fucking angry when the federal agents praise the Proud Boys as good people. We have to be livid when protestors on the street are tackled and disappeared for the "crime" of recording what is happening.

What we don't want to happen is have everything but what is right in front of us at the time fade into the blind spot. We need to make sure we are still seeing what is actually happening. Even while understanding we (individually) can only fight so many things at once. We all still need to keep our eyes open.

Normalization is happening. We need to fight against it as much as we can, as best as we can.

You can't fight every battle. I can't fight every battle. But together we can keep fighting. And protect each other from our own blind spots.

Hopefully.