I actually wrote this almost five years ago, but I still like it.
As I was driving the other day, I noticed a car passing me with several bumper stickers. Some proclaimed the merits of alternative bands, and others made various social commentaries. The best one on the car almost escaped my attention, though. The small sticker in the lower left corner of the back window read, “Normal people worry me.” I chuckled to myself a bit, thinking that the driver of the car probably worried a few normal people himself.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he and I weren’t all that different, save perhaps our choice of music. Normal people worry me as well.
Normal people, you see, think it’s okay for a woman to kill a baby growing inside her, because, after all, it’s her body. But normal people think it’s perfectly okay for a woman to compel a man to share in the financial burden of raising a child without giving him a say in whether that child should have been born, because, after all, he should have thought about that beforehand.
Normal people think that the phrase “the right of the people” means one thing in nine out of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, but everyone knows that it means something completely different in the other one. Normal people say that the founding fathers couldn’t have conceived of assault rifles and submachineguns but don’t stop to think that the founding fathers would have been even more amazed by the idea of computers.
Normal people also think it’s a good thing to teach kids about the dangers of illegal drug use, and the danger of unprotected sex, but they think it’s a bad thing to teach kids to leave guns alone. Normal people apparently think that giving young people a little bit of knowledge about sex and drugs won’t encourage those same young people to experiment, but seem to think that teaching kids about the dangers of improper firearms usage would encourage violence.
Normal people think that it’s possible to teach kids to “just say no” to illegal drugs and alcohol, but don’t believe kids can be taught to say no to sex, so we have to give them condoms and birth-control pills. But handing out clean needles to drug addicts to prevent the spread of HIV or hepatitis is wrong, and will encourage drug use.
Normal people think that, instead of teaching a child about right from wrong, parents should let the child experiment with life and determine his or her own moral values. Normal people allow and even encourage their children to watch movies that glorify violence and extra- and pre-marital sex without any consequences to the characters, without any kind of discussion about what they’ve just seen, because after all, they need to learn to think for themselves. And it’s only a movie. Everyone knows that.
Normal people will rant and rave about the rights of two people of the same sex to raise a child, so long as the adults are in a “loving, committed relationship.” Normal people think that’s fine, and that the child won’t suffer because of it. But suggest to normal people that they should spend more time at home with their kids to help nurture their emotional growth, and you might as well suggest that the moon is made of green cheese.
Normal people think that it’s a wonderful thing for the federal government to spend billions of dollars on the space program, because who knows what might be found out among the stars? But those same normal people balk at the idea of helping support research on treatments for MS, or HIV/AIDS, or cancer, or diabetes, or any other problem here on earth.
The more I think about it, the more normal people worry me.
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