Another piece for new contributor to VB, Jonathan Dodd. Ed
All my life I keep hearing two words that are supposed to be opposites.
Normal and weird.
I have to say that much of the time it’s the weird word that’s tossed my way rather than the other, and to a great extent I’m proud of that.
Back when I grew up there was a strong emphasis on changing things, and normal was used as a label for almost everything we wanted to change.
We’re ALL individuals!
Of course, we only managed to change a few things, and I thought that antagonism towards difference was one of those.
We humans love to live with and assimilate contradiction. As we grow up (we’ve all been there) we long to be grown-up but we also cling to the childhood comforts provided by our parents.
Like the crowd following Brian we insist in unison on our independence of thought and action, and adolescents assert their individuality by dressing exactly the same as everyone else in their peer groups.
Over-zealous
This is not a bad thing. In Grayson Perry’s recent TV series he explores the taste of different groups and finds that the way we dress and the things we surround ourselves with are ways to show who we identify with or wish to be like. Football fans wear their club shirts and kids dress like their favourite singers. I think this is all very human and lovable.
The obvious problems with this behaviour are when group identification becomes over-zealous. I’ve known the odd football fan who appeared perfectly normal, until a rival team was mentioned, at which point he became a fire-breathing demon, longing for violence and destruction.
Will the real normal please stand up?
Did anyone notice? I used the normal word. The football fan felt normal when he was working in the office, and he also felt normal when wanting to fight rival football fans.
What we mean by normal is basically how we individually feel and act, and of course we like people who seem to feel and act in a similar way to ourselves. Anyone else might feel and act quite differently, which would be normal for them. So which is the real normal?
The luxury of group security
People who belong to a group usually feel comfortable and normal. There’s a sense of security in belonging. Unfortunately they still feel this when they’re vilifying members of rival groups.
I should add here that not all groups do this. But when someone feels normal doing something that’s different and doesn’t fit into an established group they don’t have the luxury of that group security, and they get called weird, probably by both of the groups above, and this can feel frightening.
Transvestite Potter
Grayson Perry himself is well-qualified to talk about this, because he’s not only a Turner-Prize-winning artist, he is in his own words a ‘Transvestite Potter’.
He’s highly intelligent and wonderfully gifted, but almost everyone is going to call him weird, and to quite a few groups who regard themselves as normal, that would make him fair game for abuse, or worse.
Weird is the new normal
I’m not weird in any of the same ways as Grayson is, but my normal state is to feel weird rather than normal, 
which is not weird in my mind at all, but I do wish we had been able to change society so that everyone could just be themselves without being pointed at and labelled in such primitive and meaningless ways.
My two favourite philosophers put this argument best. The great Rousseau said – “I do not agree with what you say, but I will give my life to defend your right to say it”, and the sublime Popeye said – “I yam what I yam”.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
Images: Popeye by Marc Falardeau under CC BY 2.0 | Grayson Perry Tapestry by Image: Nick Sarebi under CC BY 2.0
