When Ann Coulter decided to degrade herself, I posted, ranting about her refusal to utilize her expansive education. Irritated that she would choose to offend those who were already hurting from society's slights and lack of inclusion and down right angry by her offensive refusal to apologize. Her attempt to neuter the power of words was ludicrous.
Words have power. Power to change. Power to change minds. Power to poison minds.
My irritation grows with every year. The fact that folks refuse to remove the word "retarded" from their vocabulary, when they have so very many delicious words to choose from!?!!?
Today I find the irony that those that continue to use the word retarded actually are branding themselves with the same word.
Merriam-Webster defines Retarded as: slow or limited in intellectual or emotional development or academic progress.
Do you really want to leap about today's world proclaiming your lack of emotional development? Your personal stagnation of academic progress? Do you REALLY want the world to see your diminishing compassion to those who are constantly having to fight for their rights as contributing members of society? When the ultimate summation of your behavior is quite simply: Bully.
And bully is defined as: a blustering browbeating person; especially: one habitually cruel to others who are weaker
Last year's post is HERE, with links to other thoughts...
This is very similar to what I tell my kids about profanity. Casual and frequent use of those words are for people with small minds and even smaller vocabularies. My list of "bad words" includes racial slurs and words like retarded. Because of this my daughter was accused of having no sense of humor (middle school, ugh!). She told them that the actual problem was that she had an intelligent sense of humor, and that denigration of others was not a topic mature minds found humor in. I'm pretty sure the response was crickets and eye rolling because they only understood half of what she said and very little of the meaning. At least she tried.
ReplyDeleteDemetri Martin says thing like that are nice little shortcuts telling people "Hey, let's never hang out" (he was referring to bumper stickers, but it applies here, too.)
Nailed it!
ReplyDelete