Normality is a sickness of epidemic proportions. Never more have I seen this since working in Mental Health. You meet so many people who are deemed "crazy" by the ignorant "unwell" by the professional, but I wonder. They're definitely not normal, but "normal" is an artificial and arbitary standard. There's no absolute truth in it. It doesn't stand by itself as the paragon of virtue. It's the majority - but what if the majority were sick? Is what we're doing as the greater community just reinforcing our own sickness so we're not reminded that we're sick? Do we lack insight into our communally crazed condition?

Phillip K Dick wrote an interesting story called "Shell Game". It ends up being about a group of crashlanded delusional paranoids who are seeing constant threats from within and without. They even engineer evidence to back up their delusions. They use logic to rationalize their murder. One individual has insight and tells everyone that they're paranoid and they kill him for uttering the truth.

How different is this to how some governments act? Not much at all - but people accept it in stride. It's the way things are. In South America, it was "normality" to want to be sacrificed to the gods in holy ritual. If you didn't accept that, you were a freak. If you ask a person now if that's "normal" you'll be told it was an abomination, but for those cultures it worked. But for an outsider, it was very, very wrong.

I live in society and I find our casual acceptance of death for consumer goods to be horrifying. The environment is dying because of crass commercialism, that someone can gain a little more power and money at the expense of the future. That power and money will do very little once they die but the Earth suffers far longer than they rot.

When I was a child, I desperately wanted to be normal, but they called me eccentric. When I was a teenager and up to my twenties, I desperately wanted to be the reverse of normal, so I railed and rebelled and wore my differences with an angry pride. Nowadays, I am myself, neither rebelling or desperately seeking approval from the majority. I don't care any more.

But I guess this is still a resistance to normality. I consciously mock the graven idols of Normality with audacity. I'm at home with myself - now, I try and show people that they can be free from the chains of normality, that they can be who they truly are and that it's OK to question, it's OK to go against the flow. More than OK - if you aren't happy with how things are going, you can do something about it. You can lead by example. You can be yourself and inspire.

I reject the everyday. I reject the casual cruelty that we can have through our ignorance and xenophobia. I reject the ravaging of the environment for an arbitary value system like currency. I may only be one drop in the wave, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. That makes me feel better, but it doesn't stop me fighting in this War. A pacifist I may be - but that doesn't mean I won't fight, it just means I won't use violence. Gandhi fought a great deal, but he used words and logic and charisma. He still fought, kicking and screaming until he was assassinated.

So, I still fight, tooth and nail, metaphorically speaking. If I go the same way as Gandhi? So be it.