Welp, time to exercise my cherished First Amendment right again……..
Every morning, part of my dog walk ritual involves picking up the charmingly-named Daily Post, which is Palo Alto’s local paper. Besides the front page articles, one of my favorite tidbits is the Celebrity File, which typically covers a variety of interesting famous-person shenanigans or news. So today I was greeted with this headline and these stories…….
So, right off the bat, and the headline article, is Samuel Jackson griping about how black roles are going to black guys from Britain. Give. Me. A. Break. I mean, if black roles were being filled by, say, Korean guys, I could understand the puzzlement, but just because they hail from Britain, you’ve got some kind of issue with this?
(Obliquely related pissing & moaning on my part: Morgan Freeman. why in the name of God is this guy in every crappy movie that comes out these days? I’m convinced it’s a manifestation of white guilt, so they put this adequately-talented black dude with those disgusting moles all over his face and those goddamned stupid earrings into every other movie that’s produced. I would literally skip a movie just because he’s cast in it. Damn!)
Anyway.
And the second article, as you can plainly see, is people bitching about some TV chef being anti-Asian because her audience had a non-glorious reaction to Asian wings. Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ, people, are you really that bored? Do you really have to spend time and energy wringing your hands over such things?
I’ve got to say, as comically insane as this new administration is, one aspect of the new fascism that I really appreciate is the sudden dropoff of Safe Spaces and discussion of the 97 possible genders a person can be. There are always going to be freaks in the world, especially with 7 billion of us running the gamut on all kinds of continuum, but I was really getting tired of so many being distracted by the issues of the 0.3% among us.
Of course, there are some that would say it’s important and appropriate to stand up for the oppressed and combat unjust assumptions based on race. And, at that point, I would turn the page of the aforementioned Daily Post and be presented with this article:
So, you’ll forgive me if I’m not shocked that the 10 people who rammed their car into an Apple store in the wee hours in the morning and ripped off a bunch of merchandise resemble our fellow humans shown therein. Perhaps if Morgan Freeman was featured in 100% of movies, instead of merely 50%, they would have a better role model.
I operate from the naive notion that individuals need to be utterly responsible for themselves and stop blaming their religion, color, or country of origin as the basis for their problems and the reason for their demands that society compensate them. I have said before that my naivete in being a Libertarian was based on the misguided notion that individuals have the same self-direction and self-respect that I do. They don’t. But part of me is still deluded enough to project these values onto the rest of humanity and assume we’re all more or less alike.
