Normalizing the Abnormal

And you know, once again, it was so jarring in its honesty and in its realness that I think that because we have become humans that are so busy doing and not being, and because there is so much that we are dealing with that are being put on our shoulders, um, we don't stop and think, fuck, how am I doing this?

How am I managing? How am I getting through? So let me read you this tweet from New York Times best selling author of Patriarchy Blues better than we found it, Frederick Joseph, who, by the way, if you don't follow him, hashtag the Black Friend. He is fantastic. All of his writing is incredible, as well as his tweets, and so he tweeted this rent is too damn high, gas is too damn high. The amount of deaths from COVID is still too damn high. The police budget is too damn high.

The amount of times World War three has trended is too damn high. The expectations being placed on us while this is happening are too damn high. I want to delve into that, because since the beginning of COVID, right, we have been told that we need to work right, that the economy can't shut down, and capitalism is necessary, and we must all do our part and find ways to manage through folks, in the time that COVID, just COVID. I will touch on the other points that Frederick mentions

in his tweet, But Jess COVID, let's start there. There have been Let's just let's get the exact number. Let's get the exact number right now, because again with all of this rush to the norm, right, rush back to normal, let's open everything up. COVID's not at all a big thing. Which, by the way, New York Magazine has a entire article and cover that says this, that's said over the weekend,

COVID is not over. And it was like a person on a stretcher in front of a hospital because guess what, folks, we still have about two thousand people dying a day from COVID, just because the media has decided to s talking about it, and the governors of said states have decided that they're rolling back you know, mandates and all

of these things. And even doctor Fauci who came on the show, said that, you know, we're at a drizzle period and so we need to we're it's okay to take off our galoshes and our rain boots and kind of you know, work with the environment that we're in. But the reality is that those numbers, roughly eighteen hundred to two thousand deaths are not normal. We've only normalized them, right, We've only decided to shrug it off. Every one of us at this point, two plus years into this pandemic.

No somebody who has died or is suffering from long COVID, which again is not actually being discussed on a regular basis. I talked to a friend recently who said that one of their family members was suffering from law COVID, and

what did it look like for them? It looked like the inability to concentrate, right, so, the inability to really work for long periods of time, to be in front of a computer that the quote unquote brain fog, brain fog, not frog brain fog that people have talked about isn't just like a oh, I forgot what I was doing. I went into the kitchen and I forgot what I was getting. No, no, it is almost complete like disorientation.

Right then, an onset of migrains, right, that are so debilitating that you need to close down everything, including all access to light because it is causing you pain, the inability to go far distances walking because it is now exhausting. These are symptoms that people are dealing with that are now being looked at as a disability. So when we say, oh, COVID is done or it's not that bad because the number of deaths have gone down, one, the number of

deaths are still too fucking high. And number two, the after effects of COVID are still incredibly debilitating and vary from person to person. So while folks are like, well, you know, if you catch COVID, it's no big deal. If you are vaxed and boosted and what have you, Well, that depends on your very own bodily ecosystem, right, And

I don't know. I still personally, while I am doing more things than I was, let's say in December, January and February, I'm still trying to be as vigilant as possible, because I don't know right my own Bodi's makeup and how it's going to fight off this virus and what it's going to look like weeks after it's gone. Because what Jonathan has told us on this show so many times over the past two years is that the virus

continues to live in your body. Right, we have no idea what the long, long term affects of a virus living in your body. Is this particular virus that continues folks to mutate. So again, it's like, I don't want us in this Russian desire because we are emotionally fatigued to want to say that we need to just move on. That we don't recognize that there are people that are still suffering, and that there are millions of people who have in fact been infected that will still suffer. So

what is our healthcare going to look like? Because I'm going to tell you that one of the things that Joe Biden had said several months ago and this point, who even knows if it was last year, if it was months ago, I don't fucking know, but I will say that what he said, what he offered was that it was not going to be allowed under his tenure, that healthcare companies were going to be able to discriminate right pre existing conditions, to discriminate against people who had

contracted COVID and were still suffering symptoms of it, meaning that they weren't going to be allowed to not cover those people or to exploit them in terms of the kind of coverage that they could get. But that is

is that law. Has that been codified in law? Or is it that when a Republican becomes president of the United States, which will in fact be the last presidency that we see, because then it'll just become an authoritarian dictator and America will have a Trump light or a Trump more knowledgeable for the next twenty some odd years. But nonetheless, I digress. The fact is that is not codified into law. That is an exception that Biden is making right now. So what does that look like after

twenty twenty four? Right? What does it look like when we know that there will be other mutations? Because if you've been following the science, and we've been following the patterns of this virus, we know that another one is going to come. And so right now, folks, let me tell you what the startling number in the United States has been. Since twenty twenty, nine hundred and sixty four thousand Americans have died. As of today, nine hundred and

sixty four thousand Americans have died. That is nearly a million people. And it will be by the time that we get to actual spring and summer, it will be over a million people will have died. But we have an entire political party that has told us that this was a hoax, that has told us that this is

no big deal, that it's just the flu. I don't know when in our lifetime we had ever seen the flu cause a million deaths in two years, the aggressive nature of COVID and how it has upended our lives, and now with this rush, and I call it a rush because again, we're not following the science. We're following midterms,

we're following capitalism. Because if we were truly following the science, there wouldn't be You wouldn't hear the President of the United States say, well, we need to put an end to remote work and people just need to get back into the office. It's now time. If you have had the privilege of working from home over the last two years, then you know that you don't need to be in

an office in order to do your job. But what you do know, and what you've become very privy to, is the fact that your employers have put in for ten, fifteen, twenty year leases for office space right that is not being used currently to its fullest capacity, and that this once again is about real estate and money. It has nothing to do with whether or not you have the

ability to do your job. Now. Sure, are there some things that are better done in person, absolutely, but are a majority of things able to be done over email, over zoom, over slack? Yeah, there are. You know. One of the things I think that has been most startling as I've been looking at the numbers of people that are still remote working versus not, is that here in New York where I am, only thirty five percent of people who work in offices have gone back to work.

So when you are riding around midday or what would normally be considered rush hour for New York City for the subways, what have you not packed? Because for those companies who weren't locked into decades long leases, gave up their buildings, gave up their office space, decided instead to have a remote work or to get smaller huddling offices that when folks need to be together, you can be. But the expectation is not going to be that you're going to be in this office five days a week,

you know, eight to ten hours a day. So once again you're listening to leaders from the president on down tell us that like now is the time to go back to normal. And I'm telling you close to a million people are dead because of COVID and that those that have gotten it and did not succumb it wasn't fatalistic are still living with severe, severe conditions that are not allowing them to quote unquote go back to normal. So the question that I have is why isn't the

administration talking about this? Why aren't people in media talking about this? Because once again there has been a collective decision that we are going to gas light the country and just move on. And so you know, I say this, and I say the collective gaslight because also we're talking about rights as I'm going to make the pivot to now move into our crisis that is happening in Europe and move to Putin and the Ukraine and NATO and America.

Is that We're having all of these conversations about how the Russian people know nothing about the true nature of what is happening right in their country, what what Russians right, what the Russian military led by Putin is doing in the Ukraine. If you were to go around Russia and ask the people what they think is the cause or what they think is happening in the Ukraine, they're going to give you the talking points that are out of

the Kremlin. They're going to tell you that their brothers and sisters are out there fighting to liberate the Ukrainians from Nazi influence. They're going to tell you that, like you know, they have been killing civilians, killing their own. They're going to feed you what it is the Kremlin wants them to know in order to keep them in

line and keep them in support of this invasion. Now, the thousands of people that have risked their life, their safety, and their well being in Russia to protest what is happening and what has happened right, those brave folks have somehow gotten around the gaslight looping system and figured out that, yeah, we can't actually trust anything that is coming across State TV, anything that is coming across our radio, our social media, right is being monitored and we're not allowed to access

you know, X, Y and Z. But again, by virtue of proximity, we know that there are tons of Russians in Ukraine and tons of Ukrainians in Russia. That's why they say like this is this is like a brother's war,

a sister's war, right, We're fighting our own family. But then I have told you that there are reports that have come out where people are literally in the Ukraine with sirens and bombs going off behind them, and their family members in Russia are telling them that they are making it up, that they are the ones that have been brainwashed. Right, So this is how disinformation and misinformation works.

And when you have a coordinated effort between your government and your media in order to gaslight you, that is the ultimate, the ultimate in disinformation and misinformation. By virtue right of oh, we're just not going to disclose. That is what is happening in the United States right now with COVID and wanting to turn the page and go to go back to the normal of twenty nineteen, which folks, even if you do rip off your mask, even if you do go back to indoor and do all of

these things. I'm telling you, the fear and the trauma that we have lived under for the past two years is not going to go away. While it feels good to sit down in a restaurant and it feels good to re engage in these environments once you go out, I'm telling you, I was out recently and I said to myself, Wow, this feels great. And then I went home and I took a test and I was just like,

still on pins and needles. We're never washing away the trauma of what we've lived through, and the fact that we are not even giving it the space and the weight to be able to work through it collectively. That the desire is just like out of sight, out of mind is really terrifying to me because I believe that this is exactly how you go about making the same mistakes over and over again and expecting a different result.

That we haven't learned anything over the past two years, right, What we have learned right about America and Americans is that we are a selfish society. We are a country that does not believe in helping other people or doing things that may cause discomfort for us if it means comfort for the majority, that we are not going to challenge ourselves in any which way to actually be better, That we can't project onto other people any empathy or sympathy if it is somehow upsets our current status and

our current state of ease. Right, There's a reason why other countries have been able to tackle COVID in the way that they have or fight back against misinformation, and it's because their culture has always been based in community and the success of the whole, not individual. But in America, all we care about, all we pride ourselves on is our individual nature and desire, the pulling up from the bootstraps.

I did it all alone, knowing that nobody has which side note as let me make a pop culture reference as well in here, because this is how my mind is working today. I'm very overwhelmed no one has done it all on their own, and that there are people that work so hard in this country, well over the forty hours a week, fifty hours a week, that hold down multiple jobs and are still not able to make

ends meet. But in our country, where do we go to get our advice from those that were born wealthy to dictate to us how it is that we are going to be able to live the life that they

were born into. And I say the pop culture reference because at the end of last week, Kim kardash received a lot of backlash from comments that she made in an interview with Variety magazine as the Kardashians are getting ready to make their premiere on streaming platform Hulu, as they've moved from regular television to streaming, and Kim Kardashian, you know, is being asked, you know, what's the what's the key to your success? And instead of saying, what

is actually the key to your success? Being born wealthy, right, being born with a name, being born with wealth, and then being able to use that wealth that you were born into in the name that you were born into, and being able to turn that into a billion dollar brand. You're able to make billions because you were born into fucking millions, right. But the answer that she gave was so insulting to people that are working so hard and still not able to make ends meet. What's he said

was people just need to work hard. Nobody wants to work hard anymore. And I'm saying, bitch, who is nobody? Who are you talking to? Because I know many people who are busting their asses, right, who are either busting their asses as entrepreneurs, busting their asses for other people, right. And in the age of inflation and how much more expensive things have gotten, nobody's fucking income has gone up to match that. We're just all trying to do more

with less. And so for somebody that was born into wealth and whiteness and a name, right and fame to then look at the rest of us who haven't had the same advantages or opportunities and then totally have a

disassociation from that reality that you were born into. Then to offer advice to other people, get the fuck out of here, honestly, you know, I recently I have started to think about, even in my own professional life, the people who I have turned into deities, the people who I have said, Oh, I want to emulate so and

so's career in so and so's steps. And I'm not saying that folks can't offer advice, but offer advice off the reel, right, offer advice off the reel, like I'll take advice from fucking Oprah right, who was born broke into poverty, into a set into the segregated South, and was able to make the most out of the opportunities that were presented. Right. I will take advice from a ditty, Right, a Sean Diddy Colmes who was taken the amtrack back and forth, you know, at the beginning stages of hustling

into creating bad boy records. Right, I will take advice from people who literally came from nothing or came from something and we're able to turn it into something extraordinary. But don't come off right. Don't come off as if you are offering something to people. And essentially, because it's essentially Kim Kardashian echoed and offered essentially what Republicans have been saying, which is why they didn't want to offer or vote for COVID relief. They didn't want to give

people any types of checks. They don't want to give the American people back their own tax dollars to support them in their times of need. No, because the assumption is what Joe Mansion said, Oh well, if I give the child tax credit, if I vote for this, then people are going to use this money to go on vacation. They're going to use this money, as he said, to

go hunting or whatever. You know, So we need to make people live in an austerity type of situation because they are undeserving of their own own money and resources back. That is what politicians say. Kim Kardashian echoed that because the assumption has always been at one at both at times, they want to hold both things to be true. On one hand, Americans are lazy. They don't deserve any child tax credit, they don't deserve any support, they don't deserve

their own tax dollars. Put back into social security and safety nets, into social safety nets that will help them meet ends meet and not And as Joe Biden loves to say, oh my dad used to say, provide some breathing room. They don't give a fuck about your breathing room. They want you to be broke, under educated, and desperate, right because then you will do anything and everything in order to get that little bit of breathing room through

a fucking straw, right, Like, that's what they want. And when you start, when you sit back and you take this all in and you look around, and you're just like, wow, all of us, all of us are falling for the rope padot. All of us are in love and indoctrinated by wealth and fame and privilege. It's the reason why you have people voting consistently against their best interest. Oh well, if I were rich, or when I am rich, I

don't want to have to pay taxes, blah blah blah blah. Well, the likelihood of you getting to that one percent having come from the ninety nine percent is as likely as you getting hit by lightning. But the lie of capitalism is in its possibility, is in pulling out those few examples of those that were able to somehow make it in their version of squid game, right, and then we use those people to say, oh, you two can do that, not realizing that everyone's situation is one hundred percent different.

There may be consistent themes, but how we attack those themes, how they show up in our lives are completely and totally different. But you see, the lie of capitalism is about the possibility of the thing. Oh, if you just put your head down and work hard, then you'll get there. And for those of us that have not arrived at that place, it is not by virtue of the system that we've been working in. It's by virtue of your laziness. Right, So we've regurgitate the same shit to everyone around us

that has been told to us. The reason why folks squid Game was so fucking popular wasn't just because it was so obscene and it's over the top violence, but because of the fact that you can literally see the parallels in our own lives and you're like, oh my god, we would never get into a competition where people would literally be killing themselves or getting the risk of being killed just to wipe out their debt, wouldn't we haven't you seen all of those I mean, from the birth

of reality TV, from the birth of Fear Factor, from the birth of these shows where it's just like humiliate yourself, humiliate yourself, or the possibility of getting a hundred grand and people do it right, and they do it and we call it entertainment as opposed to a flawed economic system. Sometimes I honestly wish that I wouldn't make the connections.

Sometimes I wish that I could just go along for the get along, because I think that life would be a lot easier, right, I would have a lot less anxiety. But I can't turn my eyes away from the truth.

I can't turn my eyes away from the fact that I honestly believe that both sides of the political party, both factions of the wealthy and the non wealthy, the haves and the have nots, are all in cahoots for the same thing, which is to gaslight the public into doing their bidding so that they can continue to live on, to live on the mountaintop and then dictate to the rest of us as they are cutting the bridges and cutting the water and cutting the access and saying to us, well,

if you just worked hard enough, you two could climb everest, you two could get wealth. And it's just you know, you're in your situation, You're in your lot in life because you're just not strategic enough, you're just not working

hard enough. Well, if you told me that if I could if I worked double the amount that I work, Right, if I could work eighty hours a week, ninety hours a week, and I too could be a billionaire, right that that it was it was going to be correct, that the amount of work that I put in was going to be an actual return on the investment, and then I too could be a billionaire. Then I would do that. Everybody would do that. Maybe there would be

some people that wouldn't, but that's not true. But it's the lie that we continue to spread and tell ourselves right, because we are in a love affair, a dangerous love

affair with wealth and privilege. You know, it's so easy, It has been so easy for us to look around at other countries and nations to either wag our finger at them for their wrongdoing in the ways in which they hurt their own citizens, right, how they enter into war, the misinformation that talent television, how they are controlling, right, whether you're talking about Russia or China or wherever has a dictatorship in communism, and you don't realize the ways

in which we're controlled, the ways in which we have the illusion of freedom in the United States. It is the illusion of liberty, but we are allied to We are gas lit, right, except we say that it's just about hard work, right, you get out what you put in, But we don't talk about what it is that you are giving up in order to buy into this lie.

Every year around this time, everybody that is adult age of taxpaying age is being squeezed by their government and then told that in times of prices, when we need

these resources back, we don't get them. Then we look around at our schools, at our healthcare, at the water we're drinking, at the food that we're being delivered, and recognizing that like I don't get to say where my tax dollars go, if I were, if I were in charge of where my taxes went, you better believe that I would want one hundred percent of my tax dollars to be going into education and rehabbing our public education system,

not only in the wealthy suburban areas, but everywhere, particularly the places that are the most underserved. If our capitalism system really worked right, then that's what would be happening. The Pentagon wouldn't be receiving hundreds of millions of dollars more than they asked for, and schools wouldn't have to be begging teachers that they barely pay in order to put school supplies together because the federal government isn't doing that.

That we wouldn't have turned our teachers into villains, right because our kids weren't passing certain tests that we're discriminatory and racists to begin with, just so that we can continue to have a working class, because you see, without a working class, there is no upper class. But we love again to pretend that these people who have more have just gotten it either by luck or by hard work,

and neither of those things are true. So as we're all being told that we need to push harder and do more, and not be a human being, but be a human that is constantly doing and producing because our value and our worth is associated with our production. Understand that you are falling prey. We all are falling prey to the extraction system of capitalism. That's where we are. So when Frederick Joseph says the rent is too damn high,

gas is too damn high. Gas right now on average, as I'm as I'm recording, this is at four twenty three a gallon four dollars and twenty three cents. At the same time that Joe Biden had the audacity to tell people that they need to stop remote work and go back into the office every day, who the fuck is paying that gas bill? Are they setting us a check? Are they sending you a check to pay now for the gas that it's going to cost in order for you to go into work each and every day. No,

they are not. And so I'm saying, folks like, let us not continue to fall for the ropadope. Let us ask the really hard questions not just of the Republicans who we know are evil, but the Democrats who tell us that they have our best interests at heart, knowing good god damn well, they don't. And this is a

thing that I am starting to grapple with. And I haven't even gotten into the other part of his tweet about World War three and the consistent right provocation of that all of these things are real and on the table right now, and we're being told to just like pretend and act like all is norm And I want to fucking open up my window and let out the most primal screen that I can and then fall back

into bed. The things that we are being told that we have to deal with, have to swallow, have to stomach, and then if we don't, we're the ones that are looked at like there is something wrong with us, as opposed to the fucking systems that are created to keep us in prison. We are at this place in the world, in our society, in our country because of the failed fucking decisions of those that we put in power, who only want more power. They're not there to do change,

They're there to make more change for their pockets. I'm sick with where we are. I'm sick with who we have become, and I'm wondering, in all honesty, do things need to get to a place of being so very bad, so very bad, that then we begin to see the upturn because finally we have reached our breaking point and everyone has had enough. I was hoping to avoid that, but at this point in the game it seems unavoidable.

The last thing I will say is this. At the end of last week, actor Jesse Smollett was carted off to jail. If you remember, I want to say that it was either twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen, who knows it, pre pandemic when Jesse Smollett, the actor from Empire and other shows, ski trip other other things, A story was made up about a hate crime right and saying that there was a news sent all of these things and

he was beat up and blah blah blah. No one really knows what transpired, what either made Jesse make those accusations, whether or not he is emotionally unwell, whether or not it actually happened, I have no idea. But I do know this is that he was just sentenced to one hundred and fifty days in jail. Right, so six months half a year, basically five six months in jail, one hundred and twenty thousand dollars worth of fines I think

another fifty thousand dollars worth of fine. So all in all he's paying, you know, close to two hundred thousand dollars worth of fines end, spending one hundred and fifty days in jail, all for lying to the police. And this is what I said. Trump and company lied to the entire nation about voter fraud and COVID, which both cost countless lives, and they all continued to walk around free. Jesse Smollett made a statement that hurt only himself and

possibly his family. Right, Donald Trump and the Republican statements hurt the entire country and the responsibility of over four hundred thousand deaths that could have been avoided had we been told just how dangerous COVID was. The deaths at the Capitol could have been avoided had Donald Trump been like any other fucking president and accepted the results of our free and fair election in a democracy. But he didn't.

How is it that these white, wealthy, fucking politicians and lawyers are walking around free having costed this country so goddamn much. But you want to make an example out of Jesse Smollett, who did what lied to the cops. Meanwhile, the fucking cops be lying to us on a regular goddamn basis about the fucking unarmed black people that they kill. Right. I am so tired of this injustice system. Am I saying that there should have been no reprimand for Jesse?

Absolutely not. But give him the same reprimand you would have given any white, wealthy, fucking person in Hollywood, Given the same reprimand that you would have given the people, he would have done better storming the fucking Capitol building then he got. Let that make sense. Make that make

fucking sense, because it does not. It is just, once again a glaring example of how unjust our criminal system is that the real criminals, they get to reinvent themselves, regardless of the amount of damage that they have caused. Those of us who only end up causing damage and harm to ourselves. No, we get to pay the biggest, the biggest price. That's what it's like to be in America. It's disgusting, and folks are tweeting and they're like, oh

my god, I didn't make the connection. Yeah, I wish too that I wouldn't make these connections, but they are real and they are glaring, and people can come up with a whole bunch of excuses as to why Jesse needed to be made an example of. And I'm saying, why aren't we making an example of the big eggest crimers, the biggest fucking rifters, and the biggest liars. Why is that only reserved for those that have caused themselves the

most harm or maybe emotionally distraught. Why is it that we can only look the other way so long as the skin is white and the pockets are fat. Make it make sense? That is it for me today? Here, folks on woke f as always Power to the people and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay woke as fuck.