Normal?

Yesterday I had an argument about the description 'normal person'. In my opinion there is no 'normal', only that with which we are most familiar, what makes us most comfortable.

We arrive in the world a blank canvas for the environment that nurtures us, and to a lesser degree our genetic material will also influence. Even the British society is not a single cohesive mass that shares one homogenous culture. For example, the cronies at the top of British society, people such as Sir Philip Green, or Andrew Tinney do not operate using the same moral compass as most of society. But I am confident they would consider themselves 'normal', and believe that they are living examples of British culture.

My research into Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) during the 1990s was examining how seeing images of diverse lives affects us all. As CMC is a recent phenomenon we just don't really know.

I know that when I was growing up we did not have television, glossy magazines and advertising that showed me how others lived. The first inkling that there were other ways of being came when I was attending High School and saw children dressed very differently and being ferried to and from school by motor car. As a homeless person I lived in a Nissen hut on disused aerodrome before moving to a council estate, not merely a council estate but an estate on Canvey Island!

We didn't travel by a car ever, not even a taxi. We didn't have holidays but the start of each term the teacher would invariably ask us to write about where we went on our holidays. My father was sometimes in prison, sometimes just absent, always unpleasant and our school holiday might be spent picking peas. Picking peas was preferable to staying inside the homeless hostel we lived in before getting the council house.

I found it difficult to understand the other girls adoration of their 'daddy' and the confidence they had that daddy would always be there for them. But I didn't think of myself as abnormal, just different.

Later I created a life that I loved, a life that was my normality, and now I'm a widow trying to create another life that will suit me.
However, my perceptions of the world, how much tolerance I show others, how much I trust those who are above or below me on the social scale is affected by the journey I have made.

I didn't convince the man I was arguing with yesterday.
He was inflexible and unwilling to consider any but his own view. He was a typical white male living a privileged life that he believes is 'normal'.

When I was making a short film about the Group Settlers of Western Australia I interviewed an elderly man who had been taken to Australia by his parents under the Group Settlement Scheme when he was just 4 months old. He grew up in a remote rural part of the SW where the settlers had no services, no infrastructure, no support at all. How did Bert he see himself?

Of course he thought he had a 'normal life', a normal family life. Riding a cow to school, harvesting wood for heating, roofing the house using kerosene cans... all this was normal.... for Bert.

Let's all be kind to others, and do as we would be done by, but all the while mindful that the other persons we meet may not wish to be treated as we would want to be. Embrace our differences, accept others as they are. The only person we can change is ourselves, and at times that is a struggle.