In the Wellesley Alum Foodies group on Facebook, a very controversial article was posted, which I will not link here because of how stupid it is: the title of the article was something along the lines of “Butter does not belong in sandwiches, and if you do this, you are wrong.” The person who posted it said she had no idea that people put butter in their sandwiches, which was fine. What was not fine was that the person who wrote the article was so culturally insensitive and clearly from a country where butter was not perceived as “normal” in sandwiches that he proceeded to attack any culture or person who puts butter in his/her sandwiches.

Some people grew up in societies where mayonnaise in sandwiches were abnormal. Others grew up in societies where butter in sandwiches was weird. And of course, there are many people in the world who have grown up in places where sandwiches themselves were not very common foods to eat. This lack of foresight or understanding (or desire to understand) is what ultimately led us to Trump Nation: the inability to conceive of the notion that people who are different than us can actually be good or okay people, and that the lifestyles they lead could be productive or possibly even worth emulating. If you cannot even fathom the idea that entire societies, like that in Switzerland and France, grow up raising children with sandwiches that are smeared with butter, then you must be so ignorant to not accept anything that is not “normal” to just you. Everyone’s version of normal is different.