Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Me Too, Continued

I'm starting to see jokey comments about all the sexual misconduct and abuse stories coming out, and I can appreciate dark and bad taste humor more than most, but we should keep an eye on it. What usually happens is that after the initial shock and awe of things like this, we start using humor to cope. It's natural. Unfortunately, it is also sometimes signalling the start of public fatigue. This isn't some blip in the news cycle, this is a paradigm shift in how the country treats half the population. People tend to get tired of things once the novelty wears off, but that is a shortcoming in people, not the issues or those that want fair treatment or justice.
So hold off on your whining about having to hear about some person's horrible experience, and their attempt to hold someone accountable for it. If it's too much for you to deal with in such large portions, then don't look at every story you see. What you shouldn't do is cry like a baby because you have decided when it's enough because it makes you uncomfortable or bores you. You only sound like a shallow, insensitive and entitled piece of shit when you do that. You come off as a narcissist because you are taking an important issue and making it all about poor, poor you.
Continue to treat these instances with the same disgust and outrage, because each one deserves the same justice the first ones got. It's not their fault that they took longer to reach you. There is a purge happening, a reckoning for people who abused their positions to humiliate, harass and abuse, to dehumanize people, and that doesn't happen overnight. So stay angry, keep being appalled at this disgusting behavior, and keep being supportive of women coming forward with their stories. Otherwise we will soon descend back into the behavior that kept them silent for so long, and it would be a shame to waste all this momentum that's been achieved so far.

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