Normal can mean what everyone does, as in normalization. But it can also mean what everyone should do. In his book on Poland’s Solidarity movement, Timothy Garton Ash gives the word to a Polish peasant who says normalnie! in the sense of “great!” Mariia of Posad Pokrovs’ke, when she asked me how I liked her little hut, actually said vse normalno? (“everything normal?”) in the sense of “as it should be.” She meant by normal not the routine of rubble around us but the virtuous order that a home represents. Human rights restored to the word normal its ethical direction: what one should be doing.
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