Atavists

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“She saw them in hospital gowns, staring toward the horizon. The patients everywhere. In institutions and outside them. Maladaptive. Because if you multiplied that prescription, for acceptance and accommodation, and made it into policy, you’d have systemic failure. On the macro level, acceptance of the normal would mean death. It had started to seem to her that, as she counseled her patients on how to live better within that new normal—or the abnormality that passed for normal—she was delivering therapeutic euthanasia.”