Equality & Other Useless Notions

Far too many people thoughtlessly parrot popular rhetoric without giving a moment’s consideration to what they are actually saying. It’s like pulling the democratic/republican lever on life; Instead of forming your own opinion, you can side step critical thought by relying on ideological catchphrases.

I’ve compiled a list of the most commonly used thoughtless assertions. Try to keep that knee from jerking.

Feminism –
Feminism is about equality, unless it’s about empowering women. It can also empower men, but that usually involves being falsely accused of rape or losing custody of your children. Feminism is about embracing your womanhood, but sometimes it’s about rejecting that womanhood as a society imposed gender constraint. Feminism is also about sisterhood, unless you disagree with some aspect of the ideology, then it is about lambasting your sisters for daring to question hallowed mama feminism.

Thoughtless ladies have tried to use feminism to justify every behavior imaginable. Everything from icy celibacy to wild nymphomania has been held up as typifying feminism. There simply is no consensus, which is why you have people like Sarah Palin using the term as a means of garnering support. Since it’s been so loosely defined for so long, it is essentially up for grabs.

Empower –
Women today think wearing high heels with jeans or sport balling a pro surfer count as empowerment. Well, why shouldn’t they? Empower is a trite and over used word indicating that some powerless segment of society can fortify itself through meaningless maneuvers and trends. The only real way to empower oneself is financial. The people holding power in society are not necessarily occupying their positions because they are white or men, as there are scads of white men living in slums right along side us women and various minorities.

Hate Crime –
Somehow along the way, intentions usurped outcome. My blowing your head off with a shotgun is not the issue; the issue is whether or not I blew your head off because I wanted your money or because I was fundamentally disturbed by some immutable aspect of your character. For some reason, society has deemed the latter crime much more serious than the former, but try telling that to the family of the robbery victim.

Terrorist –
I actually heard a guy on the news intimate that the pirates responsible for the most recent attack on a US ship were better than terrorists because ‘they only wanted money.’ Well, shiver me timbers, let’s give them a fucking medal! What could possibly explain this naïveté? I’ll grant that terrorists of the overzealous religious nature pose a complex problem to state stability, however a money hungry gunman isn’t necessarily any easier to deal with simply because his ultimate goal is financial as opposed to divine. The truth is, those pirates that got their heads blown off by Navy sharpshooters were, in fact, terrorists, because they used their ability to terrify (via rocket propelled grenade launchers and automatic weaponry) to wrestle money/goods from others. To assert that one group is morally superior over another is absurd in the extreme when you consider that these guys were basically armed thugs at sea. Pirates are only romantic in theory – in reality, they are blood thirsty rapists and pillagers.

Miracle –
You frequently hear of all sorts of outlandish scenarios being described as miraculous, but few realize just how callous of an assertion that is. What you are really saying is that god took time out of his busy schedule damning people to hell to shine a little clarifying light on you and yours, while your neighbors all perished in the very same wild boar attack in which you were spared. Why are some more lucky than others? Well, maybe they didn’t go to church, or maybe they went to the wrong church. Or maybe one of them couldn’t stop furiously masturbating to midget porn. Whatever the reason, god usually spares the water headed, home schooled troglodyte while smiting godless heathens like myself. Mysterious ways my ass; god, at least according to the peanut gallery, is nothing more than psychopathic narcissist with an unquenchable blood lust. Hey, looks like we have something in common!

Pro Life –
There is nothing like the vague potential of a partially formed human being. It’s enough to bring a tear to your eye. Fetuses serve as the perfect canvas for hard line Christians’ conditional love. It’s not so noble to champion those who cannot speak while displaying marked disinterest in those who can. For all of the supposed goodwill and charity contained in Christianity, there is none evident in those awful people who stand on street corners pushing five ft. tall aborted* baby posters into stranger’s faces. (*many of these images depict some horrid in utero affliction, like the always popular Harlequin babies.)

Political Correctness –
Being PC is both gay and retarded. Many balk at casual use of the word retard, but freely bandy about words like moron and idiot, both of which mean virtually the same thing. There seems to be this shared belief that certain words are verboten, and this is usually based on nothing more substantial than popular opinion.

It’s silly that adults wander around concerned with hurting each other’s feelings via offhand comments that in no way should offend anyone. I am more disturbed by careless grammar and sentence structure than casual use of words like retard or gay. For years gay referred to happiness, then it become synonymous with the word homosexual, now it is morphing again into meaning something completely different, which is to denote epic stupidity. This doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with its previous definitions, and certainly doesn’t indicate that the speaker is some kind of vicious homophobe. People my age and younger were using the word gay to describe things that were stupid before we had any inkling that the word gay had any sexual connotations at all.