From Frozen to Dragon Kin

Weirddave at The Ace of Spades takes a look at "Normal" in one of his "Fundamental Concepts" posts

. . . For a moment, let's think of society as a wooden house, and people as the 2 X 4s that that house is built of. The truck from Home Depot drops off a bunk of 2 X 4s, and you set to work sorting them. Most of the boards are straight and true, these you put in one pile. Some of them, however, are not going to be straight or true. They'll be twisted, or curved or short: abnormal in some fashion. These you put in a second, smaller pile. Here's the $64000 question: From which pile are you going to select a board to be used as a template for your house design, the larger pile or the smaller one? If you chose the smaller pile, I don't really want to go into your house when you're done building. It'll likely fall on me.

None of this means that the boards in the second pile are not useful. Some can be trimmed to fit in certain spaces, some will fit perfectly in spots that don't need a straight and true standard 2 X 4. It just means that you don't design the house around the boards that aren't normal.

Now, let's take this concept back to human society.

If someone is gay, they are not normal.
If someone is transgendered, they are not normal.
If someone is poly-amorous, they are not normal.
If someone believes that they are dragon kin, they are not normal.

And so on. You know what? ****drum roll**** So what? Who really cares? There has never been another society in the history of the world that is as accommodating of people who are abnormal as 21st Century Western Civilization. You're gay? Fabulous. Transgender? Sounds like fodder for a movie of the week. Poly-amorous? Just don't do it in the street and frighten the livestock. And so on. Our society is perfectly happy to allow just about any predilection, kink or fetish to be practiced by any individual as long as it isn't harming other people.

The problem is that that wasn't good enough. There is a small but incredibility noisy faction of abnormal people for whom acceptance and toleration wasn't enough. For these people that fact that they were abnormal, for whatever reason, became not a quirk but a malignant hate. They know that they are not normal, but instead of accepting that they were different and moving on, they feel compelled to attack what is normal and try to destroy it.

And this is where the problem starts. Because they are a twisted board, they think the entire house should be designed to be built of twisted boards. If every board were twisted, this would be a great idea, but since 90% of the boards are straight, the resulting house will not be structurally sound. It will collapse.

We have to reign this in or we're finished. . .

And that's really just a medium sized sampling of the entire piece. Read the whole thing. 

I would hasten to add that people are composed of a myriad of traits. Most of us are "normal" in respect to most of them. But almost all of us deviate by a standard deviation or two on a few aspects of our physical or mental condition. This variety is the so called spice of life and makes us individuals. Many of us know (and treasure) where we differ from the herd, but do not need for the whole herd to take on those traits (even if they could) or even value them.