Give me your opinion on murder. Give me your opinion on rape. Give me your opinion on letting toddlers drop acid. Give me your opinion on hiring dogs as school bus drivers. Give me your opinion on teaching a comatose person water aerobics. Give me your opinion on eating glass. Give me your opinion on urinating in your milk.
The definition of obvious is itself obvious to anyone above the age of four, as are most social justice ‘issues’. Just like I loathe suffering the deranged repeating the same bad joke to me once a week for eight years, I loathe people professing opinions about things that were long ago agreed upon by the vast majority of society. We get it! Bad things are bad, good things are good, Brooke Shields’ voice makes babies cry and dead people can’t sing in the choir. What a waste of time to repeat it!
My Twitter and Facebook feeds are littered with this junk. This week, at least half of my social media acquaintances are going to let met know how bad racism is, as if that were actually up for debate. What do they want? There’s not an award ceremony for the people who agree with society. Everyone would win! It isn’t earth shattering, it’s annoying. There aren’t millions of people who want a race war. It just doesn’t exist, no matter how bad you wish for it and clearly some do.
When you state the obvious, you have automatically reduced your audience to your adversary. You have the answer, they are ignorant and you deserve the biggest piece of chicken at dinner. You’ve made the assumption that there is a need for your wisdom, which there isn’t. Your audience thinks just like you do and we are having salad for dinner anyway.
The media plays up the existence of extreme factions for ratings and by God, I would hope everyone would understand that by now, but I ask for too much. Political players amplify these same factions, in some cases even funding them, to promote their own agendas, win voters, maintain division within the community and with it control of the population. Often they completely manufacture division and hope their targets in the community will fall in line behind it. Your outrage is purchased and controlled and professing it makes you unoriginal, redundant and unnecessary to anyone but your puppeteers.
When you feel it is necessary to state what should be plainly obvious, take note that you’ve been put on the defensive by merely existing. Don’t entertain such nonsense. You aren’t guilty until posted compassionate. When you engage in this kind of apologetic appeasement for something which you took no part in, you are complicit in a culture of blame and shame. That’s bullying, not to mention presumptuous and condescending.
Tell me why cats love tea parties, tell me why children should grow on trees. Tell me extruder guns confound you or all of the reasons why Tom Cruise isn’t an alien. Tell me you hate my writing, disagree with my opinions or why you refuse to look up the words you don’t know. Tell me the water is poisoned, the TV is spying on you and your stuffed rabbit knows where the bodies are buried. I love it all. Just don’t preach to me about what isn’t in disagreement!
Tell me you can form an opinion with depth and deliberation by forming an opinion with depth and deliberation and if we disagree, so be it because now you know, there’s no chicken at stake anyway.
The Reprobate's Guide to Pancakes 