I spent Independence Day 2016 in Los Angeles. It was a strange time in America - an election year when we would be forced to choose between the first female presidential candidate and the first orange man. Fringe ideas brooding in the subtext of political discourse surfaced as bitter conflict. Protest rippled throughout the country over myriad injustices from the Flint, Michigan Water Crisis to rampant police brutality and pervasive sexual abuse on college campus. The North American cross-section of the human species seemed less like the pinnacle of 4 billion years of evolution and more like waring tribes on the brink of extinction.

We stumbled onto a nude beach by accident looking for a place to surf. Discovering this little cove filled with naked people seemed like stepping into an alternate dimension, a rabbit hole where the familiar rules of society didn’t apply. The sentiment was infectious and we casually stripped off our clothes and got some sun on the whitest bits of skin on our bodies.