Since I’m not too good at staying on track with one topic, and since it is my blog I really don’t care, I’ve decided to tackle two separate topics that have been on my mind. Both are due to conversations that I had with people recently. One was an employee of mine in the Weatherford location and the other is my friend Bad News (BN). To be fair to him he’s not really bad news, it just always works out when we get together we end up partying till the sun comes up and crazy shenanigans happen. So when the two of us are together it’s always bad news.
I had asked Bad this question last night. What do you call someone that is straight but acts very flaming and feminine? I assumed that if there was a slang term or nickname for people like this Bad would know, he knows these kinds of things. His response was “Gay”, so I replied that was what I called him but I thought there was another term. Bad took slight offence to this and said that I was being mean to his people noting that only he could say that. I told him that I could say Gay, it’s not a protected derogatory word such as “nigger”, “kike” or “faggot”, it’s a term used to describe an emotion, a common sexual preference, a person’s and first last name. I also told him that his people couldn’t own that term as derogatory. He disagreed. Now I personally don’t consider Gay as a hateful term. If someone can rightfully use the term on billboards, government sponsored pamphlets, and name numerous organizations with that term I don’t feel you can put it into the same classification as the above mentioned words. Now here is where Bad and I do agree; I replied to him that a sentence has meaning because of the role it plays in our lives and experiences. The same can and should be said about words. Now my experiences with the term gay were all in relation to growing up and as it was used as something that was un-cool or lame. It wasn’t hateful or offensive like Queer was or some of the other childish terms. It was usually in reference to an action taking place or a location. But my experience with the word is not his. He might have a different relationship with the word, maybe it was something that people harassed and bullied him with or used in an offensive manner directed at him. I relate to two common terms as an adult we hear regularly, skinny and fat. Now someone who has a weight problem may cringe every time they hear the term fat due to being picked on throughout childhood for being overweight. Even a person that is now in shape might have an eating disorder or consistently works out for their fear of becoming overweight. The term fat brings back horrible memories to some people. Skinny can bring the same memories. Some people that are naturally skinny shudder when they think of being called bean pole or twig in relation to their slender build. Whereas someone like me uses those terms regularly when they describe their body or what size they want to be; I’m fat now, but I’d like to be skinny. Using that as my reference point I still don’t think I consider the term gay a demeaning one.
My other thought is regarding a person’s concept of reality. We were discussing murder since there was a recent murder in Weatherford. One of the employees stated that things had now gotten pretty bad. Her concept of bad was in direct correlation to the fact that she couldn’t remember when there were more than 2 murders in a year in Weatherford. Using her age as a starting point, 22, then we can guesstimate that she became aware of murder about the same time she started to read the local newspaper for current events and watch the news. If we use 14 (conservatively) as the age she became socially aware of murder in her town then for the past 8 years she assumes that 2 murders were committed per year in her small town. If you look at this as a whole you should consider population growth in relation to murder. At 14 she wasn’t fully aware of the size of the population, but at 22 she has a better concept of it. To think that 2 murders out of 7,000 (conceptual number based on her 14 year old view) is understandable, but 4 of 23,000 (based on her 22 year old view) is a direct link to things being bad doesn’t make sense to me. I know not everyone is a numbers person like me, but rationally wouldn’t this come to play at some point during your thought process? The increase of population, either perceived due to your limited knowledge of it or genuine due to growth would obviously affect social norms, crime, employment, and housing.
Time to rant:
I brought up the quote that war is peace as we were talking about this. I described growing up and living in a country such as Somalia where war is all some people have known for generations. Their SOP is walking out of the house with enough ammo for the weapon slung across their backs and going to work there is always a possibility of not coming home. This is their reality but to us in the USA it’s so abstract. We can’t imagine living in a country where all of your basic needs aren’t readily available, where you have such a diverse choice in housing and food. I know we take this for granted when we concern ourselves more with what celebrities are doing and who wins a singing concert as opposed to how much the people educating our children are making. When I was in the Military we were treated with such an indifference I had never before felt. Before 9/11 people in the Military were treated like a burden in the towns and cities surrounding their bases. The same people fighting to allow us all of the freedoms that we’ve become accustomed to were being dealt with as second class citizens. As Americans we have such a short term narrow minded view on things. We believe the rhetoric of the mass media when they tell us that every conservative right winger wants to control women’s bodies by making abortion illegal regardless of the situation or the liberal left wants to make it illegal for anyone to own a gun. As a person I feel it’s our duty to actually do your own research and see what you believe and what changes will affect your life. I firmly believe we need to get out of the bubble that we live in and put the focus back on educating our self, caring for our family and friends, while realizing how good we do have it here.
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