Our society rarely recognizes how negatively we view those who are different from us. This motif is rampant in Big Machine as well as present in other works we’ve read throughout the class like “Bloodchild”. We cast out the strange, the weird, in favor of “normal”. We shun people who aren’t like us into groups and labels that keep us further divided. Outcasts, those who don’t conform, who don’t fit, they’re called. Just like the homeless man in the beginning of Big Machine, we cast those who aren’t normal to us off the bus and into the cold.
As was pointed out in The Last Angel of History, people who struggle against the institutions that continue to promote the concept of an in-group versus an out-group are made to feel alien, like they don’t belong. And while we can realize this, it is innate in humans to want to feel accepted, to be normal.