I Wasn't Ready for That Question - Seems Normal to Me

I had a completely unexpected conversation today at Hy-Vee checkout, the kind that gets stuck in the grey and drags ya into pondering a question that came out of left field.  I was wearing a tee shirt, because it was finally in the 50’s today.  Nothing fancy, just the one word across the top and four more below it in two more lines.  I have several with similar themes from over the years, sort of my silent statement on the goings on in the world that I feel need attention.  Nothing I have not done a thousand times over the years, although today’s world feels more tense and maybe needs even more light shined on it.

As I wandered the aisles gathering up the things on my list, I saw mostly that quiet sort of stoic Nebraska nice folks here have.  A few nods of appreciation, a couple of murmured approvals, and one guy who just stared before blurting out “100%.  I wish I saw more people saying that”.  I also saw just as many folks faces tighten up or that sideways stink eye glance that always seems to say more than any words could.  None of those really bother me, if it did, I would not wear shirts like that.  Hell, I would not fly the progress pride flag with the American flag on my truck for Pride Month and I would not wear my Portland frog hat, that also says “resist”.  I do not have a problem exercising my constitutional right to free speech and my general sentiment if fuck ya if ya don’t like it.

At least until I met the checker as I was paying for my stuff, I will call her Alison.  As I always do, I asked how her day was going, she provided the perfunctory “fine”.   She then looked at my tee shirt and without missing a beat asked, with totally genuine curiosity “What does your tee shirt mean?”  I froze.  I was totally unprepared for the simplicity of that question. Unprepared for the absence of heat or agenda.  She asked the question in the way someone might ask about the color of the walls.  She asked with the clear eyed honesty we see in most youth, that kind of simplicity us adults seem to forget how to use.   

I stumbled for a moment, caught off guard by how plainly and unburdened the question was.  Not hostile, not loaded, just a young person looking at five small words, Resist, This is not normal.  I do not believe she saw the implied context, no emotional freight, no history behind them, for her they were just words screen printed on a cotton tee shirt.  I managed to fumble out some words about traveling the world and seeing many different cultures gave me a perspective, what it feels like when something is off kilter and what normal feels.  And being 60 also gives me a sense of what normal has meant in the context of our country.  She nodded politely, considered her response for about half a second and said, “Seems normal to me”.      

 And there we were, me flabbergasted, her completely unfazed.  That answer, seems normal to me, was so utterly sincere, agenda free and hit me in a way that no stink eye, nod of approval and no aisle comment had.  She wasn’t agreeing, she wasn’t disagreeing, she was simply describing her world as she knows it.  In her world the things that feel tense, jagged and out of alignment to me, aren’t deviations for her, they’re the baseline, it’s the water she grew up swimming in.  A world I experience drifting, she experiences as the default setting. 

So, I ask gently, “do you mind if I ask how old you are?”  She said 20 with the ease of someone who hasn’t lived enough decades to understand why I am wearing this tee shirt.  I told her, the next time you see your grandparents tell them you saw a guy wearing this shirt, just to see what they say.  She smiled at the thought of her grandparents and said she would.  And that was it, the whole exchange taking about a minute.  But as I pushed my buggy to my truck there was a weight settling on me that I did not expect when I left the house. 

On my drive home, a sadness started to seep in, coming from the realization that the things that alarm the shit out of me are simply normal life through the eyes of someone younger, or at least through Alison’s eyes.  Not because they support them, or even understand them, but because they have never known anything different.  They don’t have any other point to reference in order to see this is not normal.  They are inheriting the world mid-stride and absorbing it as the only version they’ve ever seen.

It made me think of the Oratory I wrote about Micro Relationships  How the smallest, mostly forgettable moments can end up reverberating the longest.  Today, there in the Hy-Vee checkout line, I was reminded how true that is.  We don’t just pass down our stories, we pass down the shape of the world, its tone and temperature, its sense what’s ordinary.  We have been doing that since people were scribbling stories on cave walls.  Maybe normal is supposed to evolve, but for me when normal drifts this far I fear the next generation won’t realize how far out of whack things are.

I felt an anger growing towards Alison as I processed that 60 second interaction.  Then I realized she was not wrong at all.  She was just describing “her normal”.   That realization left me wondering, what obligation do we have to those who come next?  We owe young people more than silence about what’s drifting out of alignment.  We owe them memory, we owe them contrast and we owe them the courage to say “the water was not always this muddy.”  Never having kids, I never really thought about the obligations of the adults in the room.  We are supposed to teach them what danger looks like, we are supposed to preserve the shape of possibility, because when a generation normalizes things that were once unimaginable, the loss is not just cultural, it is slow demagnification of our collective compass, leaving us adrift and we get to watch it all in real time.

Her question was as simple as flicking a light switch.  But sometimes the light reveals the dust and the roaches scattering.  And sometimes the youngest amongst us ask the clearest questions.  And sometimes, like Alison’s question today, they uncover a grief we may not have even recognized we were carrying.  Maybe that’s the lesson for me today.  Scrape away my biases, strip the story to its bones, and ask myself the simplest version of the question, “what does your tee shirt mean?”  And as I sat with that, a line from Marcus Aurelius floated in, “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts”.

Alison’s answer hit me hard, so now I’ll ask y’all - what did you say to your checker today?