a natural drift

How’s my driving?  Call 1-800-Eat Shit.

My daughter and I sit at breakfast at a local restaurant that serves an awesome huevos rancheros with a green chile that is so hot it brings beads of sweat to my forehead.  I look over her shoulder at the man sitting at the next table.  His shirt, bright orange with block white letters, reads Peyton Fucking Manning.  With every forkful, I get an eyeful.

The President’s daughter is a feckless c**t.

Another bumper sticker warns that my kid can kick your honor student’s ass. I sit at the stoplight and read and re-read.

Maybe I am a prude.  I could, clearly, be called worse.  Maybe I am a weakling of a liberal snowflake.

Grab ‘em by the pussy.

 If I wanted to look away from the bumper sticker, the t-shirt, the TV to avoid the profanity, I couldn’t.  There is no place to turn.

A friend posts a video on Facebook of a black comedian saying that times will be fairer when more white kids are killed and white mothers are crying, mourning their deaths.  The audience laughs. The 30-second grab from the longer “performance” loops through again. It’s an endless feed.

There was a time long past when we would cringe at any one of these incidents.  Our civil sensibilities would have been violated. Locker room talk, right or wrong, had a place – and it was in the locker room. Vulgarities might have flown in a sports bar or in a basement.  Today, we are all – every one of us — the audience for a steady stream of Technicolor invectives offered up through airwaves, bumper stickers, and digital delivery.  We can’t shield our eyes. Can’t cover our ears. It’s Dolby surround sound.

We need a societal mouth washing with Dove soap.

Our plight has been an evolution.  Or rather devolution as we have devolved into united states of a coarsening America.  Thoughts become words.  Words become actions.  As a man thinketh … Just listen. We have dulled our ability to cringe.

We can point our finger at, or give a finger to, the person we claim “well, he started it!”, or the one who has been more offensive, or more racist or sexist or homophobic or obscene or more out of line or somehow further over the top than our own over-the-topness.  We aim to one-up as we aim to cut down.  Entertainers strive for Nielsen ratings when what we should be watching is the Richter scale measuring our cultural tremors, no longer terra firma as we have lost our footing.

Maybe I’m a prude.  I’ve been called worse.

We clamor about lyrics of rap songs, images in video games, the photoshopped perfection of objectified women, the crassness of the cat-call.  And yet we endure a litany of daily assaults on our senses, we adorn our shirts, our cars, our media with crude and dehumanizing language.  We’ve become tone deaf in the din.

How’s my driving? 

 It’s horrible.  Right into the ditch.

This entry was posted on June 1, 2018 at 11:48 am and is filed under Observations, People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.