We are told at a young age to act normal and to make rational decisions. Life to be lived fully must have a foundation built upon sound mental health. You hear people say, “She belongs in the nuthouse,” or “He must have escaped from the looney bin,” and we hope they never say those things about us.

So as not to offend, the disclaimer of this column is that there is no intention to mock or degrade people afflicted with a serious mental illness that has reduced the quality of their lives. I am simply trying to understand why properly functioning human beings strive to maintain sanity in a world that greets them every morning with news of more violence, political bullying and a plethora of absurd happenings that have many of us saying “whatever” and turning our heads away from another crazy day.

Perhaps this should be the norm. After all, the universe’s habitual order is disrupted by storms and hurricanes, so why should we be shocked if people break the rules of socially accepted behavior and do crazy things?

We might be confused about what sanity is anymore. Philosopher Alan Watts wrote, “No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: He is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.” If the sane is now the insane, then trying to live within the boundaries of common sense makes no sense.

Famous writer Edgar Allan Poe was called “mad” in his day for writing graphic horror stories and poems that expressed his infatuation with death. He responded by saying, “Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence - whether much that is glorious - whether all that is profound - does not spring from disease of thought - from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.”

Poe wondered why a person with the highest mark of intelligence can be acclaimed for his extraordinary literature, but at the same time be condemned for his “disease of thought” that he said emanated from the insane behaviors of the society he lived in.

American writer Christopher Moore, who wrote the book “Shakespeare for Squirrels,” has said, “If you think anyone is sane you just don’t know enough about them.”

Everyone is crazy to someone, yet not crazy to another. You might think that a man who jumps off a cliff 200 feet below to the ocean is a nut job but I might admire the guy for his courage. Does that make me crazy, too?

English author Neil Gaiman said, “I mean, maybe I am crazy. … But if this is all there is, then I don’t want to be sane.”

Just watch the news and if “this is all there is,” then we might as well put on our clown suits and do the hokey pokey every day.

Poe was a masterful writer and just one example of an “insane” genius. Author Jennifer Elisabeth wrote about doing extraordinary things outside the box of rational thinking. “Don’t worry if people think you’re crazy. You are crazy. You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who they’re destined to be.”

There’s a long list of people who did crazy stuff, but were geniuses in their particular areas of expertise. Michelangelo slept every night in his clothes and his boots. It was said that he left his boots on for so long that when he finally removed them, his skin peeled off both of his feet and his lower legs.

Winston Churchill, praised for his brilliance in diplomatic matters, walked around naked in his office, and while in his birthday suit, he sat down with President Franklin Roosevelt and planned the strategy that was ultimately successful in ending World War II.

An absence of sanity is often the result of horrific circumstances. In Tim O’Brien’s book “The Things They Carried,” he gives a graphic example of American soldiers and the absurdity of life and death during the Vietnam War. O’Brien tells the story of a GI named Curt Lemon who steps on a land mine and his body is blown to pieces that land in a big tree. As his platoon removes the bones and intestines from the branches, one soldier sings a song called “The Lemon Tree.” Insane behavior is a common coping mechanism in war, which is, well, to many people, a legally authorized insanity of murdering young men and women.

In a court of law, a murderer can escape the death penalty if he’s declared to be insane. You would think that any premeditated killing of an innocent person is an act of insanity rather than an act of impulse. The obvious irony here is that every convicted murderer who’s put to a legal death by the penal system has been determined by psychiatrists to be of sound mental health at the time he did his killing.

That means all murderers in prison are of sound mental health. Then what does that say about those who put them there?

Rich Strack can be reached at katehep11@gmail.com.