I was watching a news report about the “K-2 epidemic in DC”. For those who don’t know it is a relatively new synthetic cannabinoid. They interviewed one woman who saw two people running around, with their shirts off, acting crazy. “It was really scary,” she said. I thought about my time working at the biggest trauma center in the area. I’ve seen people crying over the corpse of their young children, decapitated young men, knives lodged in skulls, all facilitated by alcohol. A conservative estimate by the CDC is that10,497 people died in 2016 due to alcohol-impaired driving, accounting for over a quarter of all motor vehicle crashes. Then there are fatal shootings, fights, rapes, sexual assaults, broken relationships, homelessness, due to alcohol.

I see a lot of PG-13 movies. That is the designation that commercially successful movies get. In them, it’s okay for someone to kick the shit out of someone else—really, it’s part of the draw. People can be tased, stabbed, ran over.  10, 100, or 1,000’s of people can die in them. They just have to steer clear of the f-bomb. Murder is perfectly good material for adolescents, but god forbid their tender ears hear a curse word. There is a Kidz Bop version of Christiana Aguilera’s “Come on Over”. It doesn’t have any “dirty words”, but it’s about a booty call. When my kids play educational games on the iPad there is an ad that comes up for Kick the Buddy. It is a game where you have a little doll in a room and you get to, “Explode, destroy, fire, shoot, freeze, send the power of the Gods and don’t even think about stopping!”. Don’t worry though there is no blood.

My kids’ favorite restaurant is named after the act of removing the flesh from the bone of an animal. It advertises using cows that tell you to “Eat more chicken”, presumably because they don’t want to be raised in inhumane conditions then slaughtered, filleted, and sold as cheap food. They don’t want the life that 9 billion chickens live each year in America.

Normality hides the truth. The ordinary is often ugly. It’s protective. We can hide there. We are just doing what people do. We aren’t radicals.

Sometimes, and if this isn’t divine nothing is, our inner sickness is revealed. I followed the news closely during the Kavanaugh hearings. I saw a man credibly be accused of attempted rape be appointed to the highest office in the United States. It was college. He liked beer. Then I went to a baseball game and a group of six white male students were drinking beer and talking about women’s bodies. They eventually turned to me and my friend and asked us, “Who’s hotter, Beyoncé or Rhianna?” Another one chimed in, “Don’t you think that Beyoncé, now she’s beautiful, but Rhianna is hot?  A week before I probably would have seen them as annoying college kids.