I feel kind of sketched out posting this since there was some controversy over the incident in the news and the FBI got involved so I made a throwaway..

Last year, two of my friends stole a baby jesus from a manger at a local church replacing it with a REAL severed pig's head.

These guys aren't hardcore atheists or really have anything against the church, they were just drunk and thought it would be funny to freak out a ton of people on Christmas day and that it wasn't really a big deal, maybe there would be something in the paper about it..

Well the next day, this shit is ALL OVER the major news networks. It's the talk of the town, police are telling people to come forward with information, the FBI is getting involved in investigating the incident, people are calling it "terrorism" etc..

Luckily I woke up pretty early on Christmas day and saw all the news unfolding. Quickly texted my friend, "Do not tell anyone else what happened last night and absolutely don't say anything over the phone/email. Turn on the news."

Luckily my friends kept their lips zipped and never spoke of the incident again, had they done it they could have been the new portraits for the media to plaster as this month's anti-social lunatics of America (even though they're good natured people, just took a prank too far). Then the FBI comes out on the news a while later saying that they caught the person and it was all over the news. The person who got blamed for it was a mentally ill (probably schizophrenic) homeless lady who supposedly was acting suspicious around the church where it happened. There was no clear proof of her doing anything, but the public seemed to just accept it on the level of "Yeah seems like she would've done that, whatever". The lady wasn't incarcerated or anything though, which is good for my friends' consciences.

After this whole incident, I just thought "holy shit I wonder how often shit like this happens?" Where police just arrest the wrong person in order to appease the public or something.. It was a stupid little incident, but it felt like being out of the matrix knowing something like this. I kept my mouth shut and didn't even tell my close best friends I knew who it was.

Then recently in one of my classics courses, the term "pharmakos" came up. It's a term for casting out a member of the community (usually a homeless type, criminal, etc..) in response to a natural disaster or some other unsolvable problem in the respective community. Comparing this to the nature of the incident my friends went through was sort of a mindfuck of insight into human nature.