By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his Substack newsletter

Last week, I wrote about how the social construction project of empire hammers away at our humanity with all sorts of destructive norms. This week, I woke up on Monday morning to the jack-hammering of a construction project two blocks north of us on Rosa Parks Blvd, right across the street from Greater Faith Missionary Baptist Church.

It’s Spring in Detroit. These days, the jack-hammering goes into overdrive.

My Celtic ancestors called this season Beltane, a whirling dervish of planting, budding, birds and bees, a time to celebrate abundance, fertility and fresh ideas. Beltane, which begins on May 1, literally means “bright fire.” My deep ancestors on the Emerald Isle cleansed their souls and sparked the land back to life by jumping over bonfires. They did this every year before they drove their cattle out to pasture.

Speaking of pasture, Psalm 23 comes up in the Western Christian lectionary this weekend. This ancient Hebrew text, famously read at funerals, describes the divine as a shepherd who restores our souls by leading us out of imperial construction projects, into a wilderness of green pastures and still waters. This feral Force, overflowing with goodness and steadfast love, is greater than empire itself.

On Monday morning, just after the jack-hammering started, I texted my friend Jethro, a dear Jewish brother in Philly. We got arrested together with Jewish Voice for Peace in the capitol rotunda last summer while protesting the US-funded genocide in Gaza.

Jethro sent me a pic of his library in the office at his new job. One book title grabbed my attention. We Become What We Normalize by David Dark.

I looked it up online and read the introduction. This book is about what Dark calls “the art of creative non-compliance.” It is a treatise empowering readers to cut against the grain of what is normal in the simple everyday interactions of our lives.

Dark writes:

People, it turns out, have the moral power to wrest a vibe, a scene, a neighborhood, a city back from the abusive strategies of reactive and poised-to-please people.

Dark summons the reader to notice when tension arises within – and to resist the strong temptation to assuage it with various denial strategies. Dark risks hyperbole to hammer this point home:

People skilled at pre-emptively easing tension are skilled at fascism.

Whoa.

When I read that on Monday morning, I was immediately reminded of Hannah Arendt’s Holocaust-era assessment that those who enable genocides are not innately evil people, but often just boring careerists.

Dark offers an alternative to boring careerism: “the holy work of situational awareness.” There is an alternative to just keeping our head down and doing what is expected. We can commit to “experiencing consciously the dramas that are otherwise enacted on us unconsciously.”

Dark writes that resisting fascism starts with cultivating the will and skill to ask one simple question:

That was weird, right?

Whenever we feel the awkward tension of something that is oppressive, unjust, exploitative, hypocritical, or just not affirming life, we say it out loud to someone else.

That was weird, right?

If we can’t ask this simple question in the moment, then we risk enabling all sorts of atrocities in the world – and all sorts of atrocities in ourselves. Which brings us back to the title that grabbed my attention.

We become what we normalize.

Speaking of weird, for the past couple years, I have been co-facilitating a group called the John Brown Society. We are a small cohort of white men committed to breaking rank with supremacy stories. White men are the greatest material beneficiaries of what empire normalizes. Born into this pole position, we learn to go with the flow and follow the norms without asking questions.

This comes with consequences. White men carry the greatest emotional and spiritual costs of the imperial project. We’ve become what we’ve normalized.

Entitled. Rigid. Numb. Anxious. Scared. Confused. Fragile.

The transformation of the world and the transformation of ourselves are inextricably connected to normalizing Something Else.

Thanks to David Dark, I now have a new description: the holy work of situational awareness which responds, out loud and often, “That was weird, right?”

Here are ten things that I am committed to normalizing for the rest of my life. So I can become Something Else.

1.         Normalize saying “no.”

My soul keeps telling me to slow down and stay in my lane, but I keep putting more things on the calendar because I’ve been trained to believe that it is selfish to say “no,” that I am not worthy unless I am being productive, and that I have to earn love by being “good” – so if I say no, I’m not lovable.

That’s weird, right?

2.         Normalize listening to my body.

My homeopathic doctor Carrie has been beckoning me to pay attention to the pain and discomfort that comes up in my body, to tend it, and tune in to its energy, and listen to it. Because it is trying to tell me Something Else. But I keep numbing or ignoring the pain, while pushing through the discomfort.

That’s weird, right?

3.         Normalize Indigenous wisdom and wonder.

The people who tended the land I live on for thousands of years, and my own way-back ancestors – the original caretakers of lands now called Ireland, England, Wales and Germany – lived in intimate and interdependent and reverent relationship with the non-human world. But I’ve been taught to cut off from these “primitive” and “pagan” village people, and to treat the non-human world as a resource to have dominion over.

That’s weird, right?

4.         Normalize queerness.

The entire Western world was built on rigid binaries. Everything is either this or that. Nothing in-between or outside-the-box. The bible has been quoted incessantly to put people back in the box.

That’s weird, right?

5.         Normalize vulnerability.

My life has been shaped by shame, trauma, and loss. Just like everybody else. But I have a strong tendency to hide my messiness and present like I’ve got all my shit together.

That’s weird, right?

6.         Normalize independent media.

We expect mainstream news outlets to tell us the truth, no matter how uncomfortable and inconvenient it is, even though the goal of these operations is to get more clicks and views so they can make as much profit as possible for their shareholders.

That’s weird, right?

7.         Normalize perspectives from the ghetto and the Global South.

Those who are most materially impacted by the imperial social construction project know what’s up, but the perspectives that are widely considered “legitimate” are the so-called leaders, experts, celebrities and CEOs from the whitest and wealthiest countries of the world.

That’s weird, right?

8.         Normalize contemplative practice.

My friend Bill is a Zen Buddhist. He recently told me that sitting on my mat, clearing my mind in silence, for just five minutes every day is exponentially better for me than not doing it at all. But I continue to struggle to make time for it, mostly because it feels so inefficient.

That’s weird, right?

9.         Normalize mysticism.

Ancient traditions animate a feral Force overflowing with goodness and steadfast love, who leads us outside the walls of religious institutions and halls of power politics, into the green pastures and still waters of the wilderness. But the stale and supremacist gods of the wealthy and powerful monopolize the meaning of prayer, salvation, witness and worship.

That’s weird, right?

10.       Normalize hope.

We live in a world entangled in supremacy stories and also enchanted by Love supreme synchronicities. An unseen Something Else is on the move. But on most days, I find myself believing that whatever I can’t control won’t be transformed – which drives me into spiritual dead-ends of despair, indifference and cynicism.

That’s weird, right?