We’re not in the 2000s, as much as it may feel it between the MySpace metalcore revival bands and the rapid consolidation of power in the executive branch. But we’re certainly not in the 2010s anymore, as much as I jokingly lament “2019 woke”.
Woke as in Mitt Romney saying “black lives matter”, or woke as in my generation being on track to be the most socially progressive yet.
It would be silly of me to say that people stopped saying the r-slur over the past few years. It would be disingenuous for me to say that I haven’t felt the ground move under me and around the people in my life long before January 20th. But I can’t escape that feeling that maybe the moral arc of the universe doesn’t bend towards justice. It’s certainly difficult to feel that is the case when it seems as if we have only conceded issue after issue to selfishness and irony, two of the things I hate most in this world. The world won’t become woke again if people re-stigmatized the use of the r-slur (as much as that would be nice), but it isn’t nothing.
Then again, maybe it’s not just us. Maybe it’s the institutions, the safeguards, all those who have either rolled over at the extremist turn of the past few months or have hastened it along. Those same people that have the power to guide what is socially acceptable in the spaces they govern.
Or maybe both can be true. It might be the case that we will always have more in common with the developmentally disabled and the other butts of our jokes than we will ever have with a robber baron. I’m tired of tricking myself into thinking I’m a buzzkill. I can live with one less word in my vocabulary because I am tired of conceding.
I don’t think I’m being unreasonable or grasping at straws saying all of these are connected. I’m not asking you to feel ashamed, to agree or maybe even to see. I just hope anyone reading this can look away from convenience or apathy or short-term social gratification, and instead to the connections that bind us as people. I hope even one more person would stop letting conviction end where the self begins.
- And yes, it is definitionally a slur. ↩︎