My
girlfriend is a kind and positive person, not inflicted with the same rage
fuelled, world bending psychosis that colors the filter between me and the
world. My girlfriend has the distinct ability; in fact I would go as far as to
call it a gift, to work in retail. She comes home with work stories much like
anyone else, but since she works in a shitty neighborhood in Worcester,
Massachusetts, her stories tend to take on a different tone than Jane at the
office having a baby or Margie winning a hundred dollar lottery scratcher.
Usually
her stories involve drug addicts passing out in the middle of her store,
attempted robberies, the welfare check rush and the fear of walking to her car
alone at night. These things, however, are not the kind of stories that get me
incensed. Nay, kind reader, as my skewed, screwed world view must dictate, I
nod politely and barely listen to these stories ripped straight from the
headlines or an episode of The Wire,
but hit the pulpit like a bat out of hell when she tells me relatively banal stories
like one this one the other day.
She
mentions casually, off the cuff, that she had to remove a large amount of Christmas
cards from the shelves due to a joke made in SOMEWHAT poor taste. I won’t go
into the content of the card, because that isn’t the point. I don’t see the
debate as being if the joke was bad enough to have it removed from the shelves,
I would prefer the debate to be whether or not we keep the kind of people on
our planet that go out of their way to complain about tiny, tiny things like
this. The question I ask is simple, how little do you do in your life, how do
you have such a trivial amount of issues in your day that you not only find the
time to complain about something that doesn’t matter, but the energy to willfully
ignore actual problems?
Now I
speak directly to you. To the letter writing, pettiness bleeding, defender of
dogged doucheness that has to get in everyone’s
way. You took the time to pick this card up, look at it, get offended ( a word
I feel we should have stricken from the language, as it has been overused and
championed by those we must rage against) and then take it to a target employee
and say, with what you must consider righteous earnestness, “I don’t think you
should stock this here, I find it offensive.”
Go home. Read a book. Listen to a
record. Expand your horizons, live outside your conscious mind, take in the
world around you, and gain that thing that seems to have become such a rare
commodity due to mouth breathing idiots like yourself: perspective. Does the
card with what most thinking people would consider perhaps only mildly
offensive really need you to wage war against it? Perhaps your energy would be
better spent reading up on the conflicts in Syria, studying the history of
genocide, writing an essay about how we as a human race are not actually doomed
to repeat our mistakes. Explain how written language and recorded events are
the key to determining how we prevent the endless cycle of domination and
murder that has plagued our race since we first began! Maybe, or maybe start
with something smaller. Read an article, bring it up over coffee with a friend,
and discuss it. Breathe through your nose for a whole day, pick your knuckles
up off the floor, or find uses for your thumbs.
Breathe Dave, Breathe.
I know
what you’re thinking. “You’re hardly doing that Siz old buddy, you are, by
championing a cause against petty people, becoming rapidly more petty yourself.”
And, in some ways, due to a long line of self-defeating concepts and logics
that I run through in my life, you would be right. Ignore them, yeah? Maybe I
should be concentrating on something larger, my scope is perhaps limited as
well. Think on this, though. Offensive cards are never going to be the
majority. Song lyrics will never dictate the movement of our race through the
rest of time, they will never be in charge of the collective consciousness, but
these… these people, might. I say to
you, kind reader, that my cause against pettiness and small mindedness may be
the most grand and important cause that exists. Perhaps we should all champion
it, because if not we may start complaining about how “the website said this
was 2.95 but it says 2.99” or that our kids snuck into an “R” rated movie and
how that is CLEARLY the movie theaters fault.
Adolf
Hitler wouldn’t have liked certain song lyrics. He would have made sure plenty
of things got taken off the shelves that offended him. Just think about it next
time you see “rated M for mature” being argued over, or you see something censored
on television, it all started with a letter or a phone call from someone who
was offended.
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