Even if you won’t boycott pop music for morality’s sake, at least give it up for your brain’s sake. You gave up artificial sugar because you don’t want diabetes. Now give up Beyonce (and those like her) because you don’t want to be stupid. Yes, the music is inappropriate, degrading, and offensive, but it’s also incredibly, awfully, outrageously, aggressively stupid. 

Dear America,

Lately, we’ve become very health conscious. We don’t want to put bad things into our bodies. We stay away from trans-fat and regular fat and gluten and sugar and red meat and ranch dressing. We don’t smoke. We even embrace laws that ban other people from smoking anywhere within 3 million square miles of us.

We’re getting into organic foods. We don’t want to ingest any chemicals (even though “chemicals” are a pretty broad category, but I know what we mean). We drink soy milk. We’re cutting out the carbs. We take our vitamins.

I’m not trying to talk us out of these habits. I think we take it a little too far, and I think we have a largely unhealthy fear of our own mortality, but at least it sometimes drives us to pass up the processed foods and go for a jog.

Fantastic. I’m proud of us.

Now, why don’t we take it a step further? We are, after all, human beings. Our bodies are more than just physical entities. We have minds, we have souls; we have identities that transcend mere skin and blood and bones. At the core of our being is something intangible and eternal. Our core cannot gain weight or develop a gluten intolerance, but it is still vulnerable to whatever we feed it.

Maybe it’s time we start being a little more discerning about those things — the things we put into our minds and souls. For all the energy we spend monitoring our waistlines and cholesterol levels, perhaps we should make a small effort to guard the spirit contained inside these mortal vessels of ours.

On that note, maybe you’ve heard about the controversy surrounding the Obama family’s favorite “role model.” Beyoncé apparently released a “song” called “Partition.”

Why is it called “Partition”? Well, because the singer offers a profound insight into the ways in which modern humans — though subscribing to a largely collectivist philosophy, and even spending much of our days congregated in close quarters with one another in our schools and our places of employment  – still erect barriers (partitions, if you will) which render meaningful communication and intimate human connections impossible.

Just kidding.

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