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For the last 15 years, a number of Hawaii residents have been increasingly plagued by a phenomena some call “being stuck in the middle.”

The term refers to what happens when one’s social and economic mobility is frozen by a set of circumstances largely outside of an individual’s control that keep them locked in a state where they make just enough to get by, but not enough to be happy or move up in life. 

Worse yet, residents who find themselves stuck in the middle may also feel they are invisible to policymakers, as their voting demographic often doesn’t attract the kind of political representation to push them out of their rut.  Because politics is often about the friction that occurs between haves and have nots, the middle, transitional space just between haves and have nots – the “have just enough but not that much” if you will – are the forgotten, expendables in moments of social upheaval. Many such individuals work, live, and ultimately, die in the background of Hawaii, unfulfilled and frustrated.

Before we explore this social phenomena further, I’d like to ask you a potentially indiscreet question that you may or may not have ever been asked before. 

Are you a normie?

“Danny, a … what?” you may be saying. I asked if you might be a “normie.” It’s a term that originally gained traction online during the presidency of Barack Obama among politically engaged persons on the politically extremes of far right and far left, but now has become an important concept in the emerging political conflict to define the future of America. 

The closest thing in your vocabulary to what a normie constitutes is a political “moderate” but a better description is to say a normie is someone who basically exists (but not thrives) in society with conventional beliefs, typical expectations, minimal vices, few excesses, maximum social conformity, and is your average garden variety individual. 

They get up in the morning, they cook breakfast, send the kids to school, go to work, pick up the kids, cook dinner, go to sleep, and repeat the same thing the next day. They don’t protest, they don’t hold signs on Beretania Street or Pennsylvania Avenue, they usually vote for the same party without fail their entire life, and they aren’t given to wild swings of opinions, unless of course, you really make them mad or inconvenience them.

They don’t buy expensive cars. They don’t take out huge loans they can’t pay. They occasionally take the kids on vacation, but do so only after saving for long periods of time. They are the most miserable people in Hawaii, because they happen to be the most responsible people in Hawaii, a state that rewards irresponsibility and excess.

This is not to suggest that they are not exceptional. In fact, many of them are the glue that holds society together so the fringes can gripe without consequence. They aren’t radicalized, and want society to be predictable, stable and consistently governed by the same set of rules they’ve been trained to play by their entire life.

You’ll find many normies working in fields like insurance, education, health care, the civil service, police and especially the field-grade officer corps of the military. Normies, since the end of World War II, typically come from a long line of middle class professional suburban Americans and end up becoming, themselves, middle class professional suburbanites just like their parents and grandparents before them.

You won’t ever see the press release when a normie engineer at NASA fixes a key communications satellite problem. You will, however, see your for-profit media report on the axe murderers and new entertainers or celebrities.

“Normies” are hated by the far right and far left because they see, mostly, nothing wrong with America, the idea, or America, the country as a whole. The only thing “wrong” for a normie is when they see that a government bureaucrat or elected official neglecting basic services and infrastructure that they’ve come to depend on, because if the traffic gets out of control, or the school bus service becomes unreliable, that threatens the normie’s ability to do what they do best and must do above all else – go to work, make money, feed the kids and pay the bills.

Yes, if you’re a normie, chances are you have a household income of between $55,000 to $250,000, you have at least a college education, you are very skilled or very technically proficient in something rare and mysterious that important people pay you to deal with so they don’t have to themselves, and you’re likely upset that both Democrats and Republicans don’t seem to know what they’re talking about lately.  

Key normie gripe: Things are not so bad, things are not so great, but things sure as hell aren’t what they’re supposed to be.

And why do normies know better than the Democrats and Republicans in charge? Because in all likelihood, they’re probably also the cogs in the collective machine that’s being run into the ground, so they intimately know better than others what works and what doesn’t work. But because they’ve been trained to work hard, keep their heads down, save as much as possible, and hope, in the end, “it will all work out,” the normies are doomed when all is said and done.

This is the growing problem we have in Hawaii and all across America. If you want to make a political name for yourself in 2024, ally yourself with either the elite faction or the oppressed faction, because both extremes will get you the publicity you need, the volunteers necessary to shake up society, and the fame that will get you ultimately wealthy in the end from the same corporations that buy out everything and everyone else.

If you really want to get something done, don’t speak from expertise — pander instead to the very rich or very poor (I say all this sarcastically, before you start writing me hate mail). If you want to be noticed by elected leadership, don’t organize your neighbors — organize a non-profit. If you want to have things named after you, don’t do great things in this world. Instead, cut great checks to weak men and women in local power.

The French  infamously said “demography is destiny” and God forbid that you should ever be doomed to be a middle class normie in Hawaii. It’s a thankless existence of working hard, studying hard, following the rules, doing your best, and discovering, when all is said and done, it wasn’t enough.

So to our City Council members, mayor, state legislators and governor, if you’re reading this, know that a society that is divided cannot stand. The bulk of your residents and citizens are doing their damndest to obey your laws, pay the taxes, make ends meet, and they too have hopes and dreams that have gone unfulfilled for too long. 

Just because all of us don’t have a voice doesn’t mean we’re not suffering, and the time will come when the middle class normie is tired of being crushed by all of society, and that just might result in a very different political future for all of you.