This is one of those political-social things that I try not to do too often.
I read this article in The Atlantic regarding the outrage at Yale with Halloween costumes. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/
It all started when administrators sent this email (and I JUST learned what TL;DR means, and fuck you: TD;FU. That’s Too Dumb; Fuck You. And I know “You” starts with a Y, and if you even thought that, I reiterate: TD;FU):
Dear Yale students,
The end of October is quickly approaching, and along with the falling leaves and cooler nights come the Halloween celebrations on our campus and in our community. These celebrations provide opportunities for students to socialize as well as make positive contributions to our community and the New Haven community as a whole. Some upcoming events include:
• Haunted Hall Crawl & Costume Ball at Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History
• Grove Street Cemetery Tours, Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven
• YSO’s Halloween Show, Woolsey Hall
However, Halloween is also unfortunately a time when the normal thoughtfulness and sensitivity of most Yale students can sometimes be forgotten and some poor decisions can be made including wearing feathered headdresses, turbans, wearing ‘war paint’ or modifying skin tone or wearing blackface or redface. These same issues and examples of cultural appropriation and/or misrepresentation are increasingly surfacing with representations of Asians and Latinos.
Yale is a community that values free expression as well as inclusivity. And while students, undergraduate and graduate, definitely have a right to express themselves, we would hope that people would actively avoid those circumstances that threaten our sense of community or disrespects, alienates or ridicules segments of our population based on race, nationality, religious belief or gender expression.
The culturally unaware or insensitive choices made by some members of our community in the past, have not just been directed toward a cultural group, but have impacted religious beliefs, Native American/Indigenous people, Socio-economic strata, Asians, Hispanic/Latino, Women, Muslims, etc. In many cases the student wearing the costume has not intended to offend, but their actions or lack of forethought have sent a far greater message than any apology could after the fact…
There is growing national concern on campuses everywhere about these issues, and we encourage Yale students to take the time to consider their costumes and the impact it may have. So, if you are planning to dress-up for Halloween, or will be attending any social gatherings planned for the weekend, please ask yourself these questions before deciding upon your costume choice:
• Wearing a funny costume? Is the humor based on “making fun” of real people, human traits or cultures?
• Wearing a historical costume? If this costume is meant to be historical, does it further misinformation or
historical and cultural inaccuracies?
• Wearing a ‘cultural’ costume? Does this costume reduce cultural differences to jokes or stereotypes?
• Wearing a ‘religious’ costume? Does this costume mock or belittle someone’s deeply held faith tradition?
• Could someone take offense with your costume and why?
Here is a great resource for costume ideas organized by our own Community & Consent Educators (CCEs) https://www.pinterest.com/yalecces/
We are one Yale, and the actions of one affect us all…, so in whatever fashion you choose to participate in Halloween activities, we encourage everyone to be safe and thoughtful during your celebration.
Sincerely,
The Intercultural Affairs Committee-
Maria Trumpler – Office of LGBTQ Resources
Sharon Kugler – University Chaplain’s Office
Peter Crumlish – Dwight Hall Center for Public Service & Social Justice
Kelly Fayard – Native American Cultural Center
Omer Bajwa – University Chaplain’s Office
Risë Nelson – Afro American Cultural Center
Leah Cohen – Joseph Slivka Center for Jewish Life
Melanie Boyd – Office of Gender and Campus Culture
Eileen Galvez – La Casa Cultural
Brian Tompkins – Yale Athletics
Saveena Dhall – Asian American Cultural Center
Anne Kuhlman – Office of International Students & Scholars
Burgwell Howard – Yale Dean of the College Office/Office of Student Life
There you have it. What a bunch of brave souls.
On the surface, rad, right? People doing the right thing, who will be on the right side of history. I mean, it would be interesting to see how Cleveland would deal with this shit.
Uhh…don’t dress as this guy. It’s totally fine to wear a shirt with this guy if you’re being a baseball player. But not to be this guy.
Okay, crisis averted. A bunch of people can dust their hands and be all “Wow, we did a really good thing today.”
And before we get into the controversy, because this email wasn’t the controversial one, let me tell you why this email is complete horseshit:
The tone of this, to me, is all about “Don’t embarrass Yale.” It’s not about “Hey, let’s be cool to each other because it’s the right thing to do” or “Think of how you might feel about a costume when you look back on this time and whether it’s worth it” or “Here’s a student sharing a story about a time she was offended by a racist costume, so think about this human person before you get dressed up.” It’s all about not embarrassing Yale. “What you do reflects on us, so just be fucking Iron Man or some shit.”
In my opinion, this email is just a preemptive strike so that when a student dresses poorly on Halloween, Yale can save some time in the standard “We do not endorse racism” apology by saying “We actively encouraged students to consider alternatives.”
And that’s just the loser way of saying the truth: We are a college, these are college students. Surprise, one of our students went out on a night where students get alcohol poisoning and I can see some of their actual vaginas, and this student dressed in a racially-insensitive costume. Dumb choice, not one we endorse or make, and that’s the phrase that could be said of 90% of college student decisions. Frankly, if we were making their choices for them, they wouldn’t even BE HERE because student loans, amirite? Haha, anyway, you know the drill. We ain’t racist, our student did a racist thing.
Alright. Let’s do the second email.
This was sent by Erika, a lady who is basically a lecturer and student advisor who lives on campus and works for the university. She read this admin email, heard some of the responses from students, and felt that a response was warranted:
Dear Sillimanders:
Nicholas and I have heard from a number of students who were frustrated by the mass email sent to the student body about appropriate Halloween-wear. I’ve always found Halloween an interesting embodiment of more general adult worries about young people. As some of you may be aware, I teach a class on “The Concept of the Problem Child,” and I was speaking with some of my students yesterday about the ways in which Halloween – traditionally a day of subversion for children and young people – is also an occasion for adults to exert their control.
When I was young, adults were freaked out by the specter of Halloween candy poisoned by lunatics, or spiked with razor blades (despite the absence of a single recorded case of such an event). Now, we’ve grown to fear the sugary candy itself. And this year, we seem afraid that college students are unable to decide how to dress themselves on Halloween.
I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community. I know that many decent people have proposed guidelines on Halloween costumes from a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense. I laud those goals, in theory, as most of us do. But in practice, I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.
It seems to me that we can have this discussion of costumes on many levels: we can talk about complex issues of identify, free speech, cultural appropriation, and virtue “signalling.” But I wanted to share my thoughts with you from a totally different angle, as an educator concerned with the developmental stages of childhood and young adulthood.
As a former preschool teacher, for example, it is hard for me to give credence to a claim that there is something objectionably “appropriative” about a blonde-haired child’s wanting to be Mulan for a day. Pretend play is the foundation of most cognitive tasks, and it seems to me that we want to be in the business of encouraging the exercise of imagination, not constraining it. I suppose we could agree that there is a difference between fantasizing about an individual character vs. appropriating a culture, wholesale, the latter of which could be seen as (tacky)(offensive)(jejeune)(hurtful), take your pick. But, then, I wonder what is the statute of limitations on dreaming of dressing as Tiana the Frog Princess if you aren’t a black girl from New Orleans? Is it okay if you are eight, but not 18? I don’t know the answer to these questions; they seem unanswerable. Or at the least, they put us on slippery terrain that I, for one, prefer not to cross.
Which is my point. I don’t, actually, trust myself to foist my Halloweenish standards and motives on others. I can’t defend them anymore than you could defend yours. Why do we dress up on Halloween, anyway? Should we start explaining that too? I’ve always been a good mimic and I enjoy accents. I love to travel, too, and have been to every continent but Antarctica. When I lived in Bangladesh, I bought a sari because it was beautiful, even though I looked stupid in it and never wore it once. Am I fetishizing and appropriating others’ cultural experiences? Probably. But I really, really like them too.
Even if we could agree on how to avoid offense – and I’ll note that no one around campus seems overly concerned about the offense taken by religiously conservative folks to skin-revealing costumes – I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive? American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition. And the censure and prohibition come from above, not from yourselves! Are we all okay with this transfer of power? Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity – in your capacity – to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you? We tend to view this shift from individual to institutional agency as a tradeoff between libertarian vs. liberal values (“liberal” in the American, not European sense of the word).
Nicholas says, if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society.
But – again, speaking as a child development specialist – I think there might be something missing in our discourse about the exercise of free speech (including how we dress ourselves) on campus, and it is this: What does this debate about Halloween costumes say about our view of young adults, of their strength and judgment?
In other words: Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that.
Happy Halloween.
Yours sincerely,
Erika
Alright. Let’s sum this up.
We have Group A saying “Don’t do this because it’s bad.” They are administrators in positions where it’s their job to tell people what is and isn’t offensive.
We have Group B saying “Make your own decisions about what is and isn’t acceptable.” These are people who live with students and are coming at it from an angle of personal development.
I just want to repaste this line from that second email:
And the censure and prohibition come from above, not from yourselves!
Now, I would think that the reaction to this would be fairly ho-hum. You’ve got admins taking the safe, admin position, you have people who interact with students on the regular advocating for those students to be empowered, and most people will probably find their truth in between those two positions. Adults would make adult decisions, and we’d all move on. Some of us would get drunk on Halloween, some of us would eat enough Caramel Apple Pops to get sick, and me of us would do both.
Ready to see it get gross?
Here’s Nicholas, who was quoted in the second email, and whose wife wrote the email. He’s “talking with” a student regarding the contents of that email.
Ah, youths.
Apparently, students are pissed at Nicholas and Erika for having the audacity to say that, just maybe, they should work this out for themselves instead of waiting for Captain University or whoever to tell them what’s right. Nicholas and Erika had the gall to express the fact that they too, the adults, are sometimes confused and uncertain about the exact boundaries and have difficulty making strict decisions about this stuff.
Why did I say it’s gross?
What’s the reaction to Nicholas saying “No, I don’t agree with that”? Shouting. Yelling “fuck” in his face. Taking off your backpack and getting in his face.
Well done, student. Very grown-up.
There’s an irony here, to me anyway. The student yells about how Nicholas isn’t making the school a safe place, but she seems to feel awfully comfortable getting right up in someone’s face, a white man in a position of power. That seems like a safe place to me. Try getting in your boss’ face that way when you disagree with your year-end review. Try arguing with other scholars about a paper in that fashion. In any situation, in any public space, for the rest of your life, try treating someone that way and see how well that works.
Or, to think about it another way, couldn’t you use that same energy and get in someone’s face if they actually do wear a costume that offends you? Seems like this is no problem for you. Seems like you can hold your own just fine and don’t need someone to tell you what to think and do.
Don’t get me twisted. I’m not saying that people should shut the fuck up and do what they’re told. I’m saying that this student is exercising the very right that she was being encouraged to, and she’s misdirecting her anger at one of the few people who are advocating for that right in full. I think she’s acting in a very childish, stupid fashion that’s pretty disappointing to see.
Yeah, stupid. I think the way she’s acting is fucking stupid. She’s probably a smart person. Shit, she’s at Yale. But the way she’s acting is not the way a reasonable person acts. I’m judging her based on a passionate moment, which is dangerous in its own way. Acknowledged.
She’s not nearly the only student either. There’s a very vocal group rallying around this whole thing, and I think they are being very stupid too.
I think people will disagree with me because they feel like the students are advocating for what’s right. I, like Nicholas, do not agree.
Actually, not like Nicholas. I don’t want to put my words in his mouth. So I’ll use my own. I think these students are fuckfaces who are so entitled that they think the only response to a demand of an apology is a hearty I’m So Sorry. I’ve demanded a lot of shit in life that I don’t deserve and don’t get. When I’ve ejaculated in the day and demand that my own penis get hard again, how well do you think that works for me? I’ve tried writing it down, yelling it, and just willing it to happen. And you know what? Nada. Because my penis doesn’t have to get hard more than once a day. It doesn’t OWE me multi-boners. My penis isn’t wrong for saying “Once a day is all you get, sir.”
There are students who say they can’t stand to live on campus anymore because of this Halloween email. Who demand an apology. Who spat on people who wanted to have a discussion about tolerance. Read that fucking article, I’m telling you.
By calling for Nicholas and Erika to step down, these students don’t realize that they’re exercising the EXACT same right as Nicholas and Erika, and the administrators for that manner, exercised in writing the Halloween letters in the first place.
And the really bothersome piece, to me, is that what these students think of as sticking up for themselves is really sticking up for administrator’s rights to shelter them.
I would ask this question to students: At what point are you entering the world? Because I will tell you right now, unequivocally, I’ve had very nice landlords, and not one would give a flying fuck if I called and said, “My neighbor is wearing an offensive Halloween costume.”
Go to a bar on Halloween. You’ll find someone wearing something questionable. SOMEONE is buying those Indian costumes at the Spirit Halloween Store. Go to the bar, and instead of ignoring it or telling the person off yourself, tell the bartender that this is bothering you. See how much help you get.
Let me tell you a little something from the perspective of someone who works with the public.
There are people out there who will come up to the front desk where I work and say there’s a mess in the bathroom. All too often, this is solved by flushing a toilet. Seriously. Pushing the button to flush a toilet.
There are people who will walk up to a desk and say, in essence, to someone else “There’s a shit in a toilet that hasn’t been flushed, and I as an adult human need to know that someone’s taking care of it.”
Flush bothersome shits, my friends. Just fucking do it. Have some agency. Take THAT much control of your life. Or, ignore them. Move on.
We could email the whole world and tell them to please flush their shits. We could beg. Do you think it would matter?
We could send emails all fucking day about which costumes are appropriate, or you could grow up, be an adult with a brain, and when you see someone in a costume that offends you, you can either say something about it or not. Flush the shit or leave it be.
What I’m getting at here is that I don’t love it, but the world is not a place where you will be able to walk around and never find an unflushed shit. You’re going to find them, and maybe it’d be a good idea to figure out how to deal with unflushed shits before you’re confronted with them. Decide if you’re the kind of person who can confront the situation, if you’re the kind of person who will beat herself up later if she doesn’t say something, or if it’s better to just think “You know what? Fuck that guy. That costume is not cool, but that guy’s probably a fucking dildo anyway, so who gives a shit?” Because that guy probably IS a dildo. Seriously, he’s probably dressed as a giant dildo. This makes it a lot easier to think of him as a dildo in the pejorative. One plus of Halloween.
But think about it. How should you react to someone in a racist costume? How should YOU react? Not “How should society react?” You. Decide. And maybe you’ll fuck it up or it will take a couple tries to get it right. Then you change your mind and try again. That’s growing up.
Here’s the big thing, to me, the really ridiculous part that makes this whole story interesting: The students don’t seem to know how to react to the fact that Nicholas and Erika don’t have an interest in apologizing for what they said. Because what they said, they believe, is totally fine.
When Nicholas says, “I don’t agree with that” the student is set off. It’s non-stop from there. From the simple, soft phrase, “No, I don’t agree with that.”
Break it down. If we’re breaking down emails to the letter. “No, I don’t agree with that.” Not, “No, I don’t agree with you.”
That’s what results in the lineup of fucks and questioning this person’s entire career and position and saying that he is causing a campus to be an unsafe place. “I don’t agree with that.”
It’s what we see all the time now.
Person fucks up on the internet.
Person gets whirled up in a shitstorm.
Person is fired or loses sponsors or whatever consequences can be called upon.
Person issues an official, unsatisfying apology that almost never reflects how they really feel, and simply exists to put a bandage on this situation as opposed to making any kind of real change.
What we have here, what we see, is that we’ve made it difficult to make the progress we actually want.
To the point: Nicholas and Erika advocated for student autonomy. They could have said “Don’t like the admin email? Tough. Happy Halloween.”
And do you think, next time something like this happens, Nicholas and Erika are going to stick up for students? Or do you think they’ll be safe as fuck and just ignore the entire thing?
Last things. This is directly for Yale students who are outraged. And for those people that end up expressing internet outrage more than most other emotions.
First, read The Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. Read it. Identify how you’re using these bad arguments in your own life.
For the love of fuck, stop reading an email like Erika’s and saying “You’re telling people it’s okay to dress in blackface.” That’s obviously not what’s happening there. Take a deep breath, read it again, and if you have a thesis at the end, maybe go through with a green highlighter and highlight the shit that supports your thesis, then go through with blue and highlight the shit that doesn’t. You’re a student. Act like one.
And for the love of fuck, asking the question of whether or not it’s okay for a girl who’s 8 and loves Mulan to dress as Mulan is NOT the same as saying “It’s okay for little white girls to dress as Mulan.” It is completely different to ask that question. It’s different to say “I don’t know what’s right and wrong” than it is to say “there is no such thing as right and wrong.” It’s called having dialog. It’s called discussion. It’s called thinking for your fucking self. You can think it’s not okay for an 8 year-old to dress as Mulan, and that’s a valid opinion, but that doesn’t mean the question is mean-spirited or built to hurt or repress. You are mad at one of the possible answers, not at the question. You’re mad that someone is implying that there’s more than one answer. You would probably be mad if it was suggested there were more than TWO answers, yes and no, which there most definitely are. The question is designed to be answered, and to provoke you to answer for yourself. But that question is not an offensive thing to ask. It’s just not.
Be mad when someone tells you what to do, not when someone asks your opinion. Even if you think the answer is very clear in your mind.
To clarify, let me ask some questions that are ACTUALLY offensive. See if you can spot the difference:
My son is handicapped and wants to dress as Barack Obama with included blackface, and don’t you think that’s so fitting because Nobama!?
My daughter is really obsessed with the whole blackface minstrel thing, as 5 year-olds tend to be. Isn’t that age just darling?
My son is going as your father. Do you think I can shrink my son’s penis enough to pass as your dad?
I’m gonna be Russian this year, so how do you think I can get drunk enough before I leave the house?
Do you think it’s alright if I dress as a bum because I give those assholes bus money they probably spend on drugs anyway?
Okay? THOSE are offensive questions. They are not meant to inspire dialog. They are stupid and thoughtless, and the small penis one might be funnier if you asked someone about prosthetic dicks to INCREASE size because I think it might actually be funnier to imply that someone’s father has an enormous hog.
Here’s the crux, students. You had people nudging you to think for yourself, and you had people who wanted to just give you the answers.
Learn. Become the person you’re going to be for the rest of your life.
The good people you’ll remember as educators are the ones who made you think through the answers yourself. Who asked you questions and led you to methods and processes as opposed to handing you a list of memorizable answers. Your ability to process and make decisions is going to do you a lot more good after college than your ability to memorize lists of shit. This includes true decisions of taste and actual, factual decisions where there is more than one right answer. Nobody is going to make you a decision tree for life. Trust me. Working a register at McDonald’s requires decision-making skills beyond being told what to do and how to do it all the time. If you plan to do that or better, then get your shit together.
Your allies for the rest of your life are not going to be the people who hand you a checklist of acceptable costumes. This is not something that falls under the purview of the President of the United States every October. This is not something that your parents are going to regulate. This is a decision you will have to make for yourself. What’s okay for you and what you’ll tolerate from others, and -gasp- you might even find that those two standards are different.
For the love of fuck, you’re smarter than this. Stop pretending that you’re too stupid to figure this shit out for yourselves. Stop pretending like Erika’s email is cloudy and difficult to interpret. Stop taking the purpose and stated points of an email and saying something that you KNOW is false about it.
Just to cap this off, I just want to make sure and list some other costumes that are inappropriate, just in case you thought maybe you’d have some fun:
Mummy: Uh, excuse me? This is an ancient Egyptian burial rite. I mean, yes, there were mummies in Chile, Peru, The Canary Islands, The U.S., Australia, Italy, and Japan, but fuck you anyway.
Vampire: Uh, excuse me? That plays on the stereotype that Transylvania is home only to vampires and also is tied in to a lot of old time fears about loss of virginity. Plus, not everyone with dental problems is bad.
Frankenstein: Uh, excuse me? Frankenstein’s monster is based on the Jewish legend of the Golem. This is cultural appropriation at its worst.
Peacock with Feathers: Um, excuse me? Only male peacocks have elaborate feathers. You’re not only potentially cross-dressing, but this costume is reinforcing the patriarchy.
Thor: Um, excuse me? Thor is a norse god. This is the equivalent of dressing as Jesus.
Jason: The implication that Jason’s mother would make a twist ending is that a woman wouldn’t be capable of killing a camp filled with counselors. This is reductive.
Freddy: As a former child molestor, this character has a diagnosable condition and needs therapy and understanding, not negative portrayal.
Michael Myers: Ah, yet another character from the “insane asylum” who is a thoughtless killer. Stereotypes like crazy! Oh, I mean, Stereotypes presented heavily.
Pumpkin: Potentially offensive to vegetarians and vegans now that you’ve meat-ed a vegetarian/vegan option.
Hobbit: Offensive to little people.
Giant: Offensive to large people.
Dinosaur: May offend the religious beliefs of those who believe that dinosaur skeletons were put on Earth to test our faith and dinosaurs never really existed as living creatures.
Satan: May offend satanists. Granted, a group that’s tough to offend, and they generally seem to adorn their motorcycle vests with images of the man, but still, better to not risk it.
Okay? Is that enough?
Wait, there’s one more thing.
I can’t tell what’s happening right now. I feel like it’s one of these two things:
A) People are getting real uptight and sensitive about bullshit that doesn’t matter. Halloween costumes on a college campus, for example. Actually, scratch that. PROJECTED Halloween costumes. These were emails in advance.
B) I’m becoming the old white man conservative that I was perhaps always destined to be.
Now, I don’t think B is the case.
I think abortion is important to have as an option. I think that it’s fucking insane that Hobby Lobby can tell employees what’s best for the private matter of their health. I think guns are for scared idiots. I think everyone should have enough to live, and I would gladly pay more taxes to accomplish this. I don’t think that people should go into debt from disease or education. I don’t really like weed, but I think some people do and some people it helps, and frankly it’s already so common that just let it be legal. I have a hard time understanding why it’s even remotely legal to say that a gay person can’t do whatever a straight person can, I think the most important thing regarding which bathroom people use is that we find a useful way to divide it so that we don’t have one bathroom that’s getting used all the time while the other is unused, and I’m fine with that division being whether you were born on an odd or even day. I think that religion is continuing to be a negative and ruinous force in America, and good things happen in the name of religion, but it’s not good enough. I think immigration should be discussed in terms of how we can help human people and how we can make things workable for people who live in one place and the other people who want to or already do. I don’t think, I KNOW climate change is fucking real, and the fact that it’s a political issue is the stupidest, most backward thing that brings me shame and anger every day. Seriously, every day. That people can just choose to ignore evidence is insane.
I feel like I’m progressive on every issue.
Except this one.
I don’t really care for a lot of the things we’re doing in the names of what’s being called social justice. When I watch the video above, I don’t want to have my beliefs associated with and expressed by someone who is screaming in someone else’s face. That’s what I dislike so strongly about the people we call conservative, that certainty that they are always right. That god’s always on their side. That they’re waging a holy war in Kentucky by denying people their Supreme-Court-given rights. That’s what I hate about that side of things, and now I see it coming from this side too. From the camp that I used to be a part of.
I don’t care for the way we take people who say something we don’t like and make them out to be monsters.
I don’t care for the way in which pointing out the ways in which other people slip up and fuck up has become an industry. No, wait. It hasn’t become an industry. It’s what picked over the bones of journalism to become Buzzfeed, HuffPo, Slate, and the others. I used to love Slate too. They aren’t what they used to be. They’re not doing the journalism they used to. Vice went from being the wildcard to being the lovechild of Maxim and GQ.
I don’t care for the way we let these organizations and groups tell us what the proper terms are and aren’t. I was born in the 1980’s. That doesn’t mean I don’t care what people want to be called. It means that, if it’s needed, I’ll fucking ask them because I have fucking spine enough to ask Steve about his pronoun preference. I’ll let him make his own decision because he’s a human person who is fully capable and doesn’t need an organization to decide for him. GLAAD is probably right for a good percentage of people, but maybe GLAAD isn’t right when it comes to Steve. Maybe Steve feels that the pronoun “they” should only be used in the plural because as much as he promotes and loves his lifestyle, he loves classic grammar more, and that’s his choice.
I don’t like that people feel like it’s okay to act like assholes because they are on the side of social justice. I think there are situations where acting like an asshole is totally justified and even violence becomes necessary, and I think those are legitimate civil rights issues, not opinions on whether or not students should make their own decisions on Halloween costumes. That’s fucking ridiculous, and it’s not justified to act like a bigger asshole than the original, alleged asshole when it comes to something like this.
Overall, and this is the fucked up part, this constant stream of outrage over what is all-too-often nonsense issues is making me very apathetic to the whole thing, and I feel more and more repulsed by the way people on the far left are acting than I ever have before.