Athenae, Current Affairs

Marmalade Jars

Show me the lie:

And, like, I don’t UNDERSTAND the stupid culture war shit over stuff like this. Even the pronoun nonsense makes more sense than this, and it makes no sense. At least then you might be talking about something you might actually do, or say, or have to change. You can still buy the damn rice. If you didn’t think about racism before this when buying Uncle Ben’s, you don’t need to think about it when buying Ben’s.

(Call me, Ben, we need a discussion about your “roasted chicken” flavor which does not taste at all like a roasted chicken, THAT is worth getting het up about.)

This is the kind of thing that, when someone acts like it outweighs damage to someone else’s actual life, makes me bonkers. I’m sorry you have to buy a new brand of strawberry preserves or whatever, but my friends are being deported and some of them are worried about being killed in the streets. How are those things analogous? How did you become so easily provoked? What is your idea of a proportional response here?

You were momentarily asked to consider an experience other than your own, possibly more than once, and the cumulative weight of that mental labor made you want to SEND A MESSAGE and VOTE FOR THE FLAG and KNEELING AT FOOTBALL GAMES and SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS and MY HALLMARK COMMERCIALS and what the SHIT, even. You feel like you’re under siege as a comfortable white person in America, because of THIS?

I know, by the way, the difference between this and genuine disgust and frustration with a society that helps all of us too little. That you’re in massive debt for a middling college education and that you have no way of seeing a doctor that isn’t like reaching the North Pole on roller skates. That the factories closed and the unions are powerless and the streets aren’t clean anymore are absolutely reasons for anger. You want to say you’re mad nobody is helping you, I agree. (Stop voting for people who kneecap state and municipal governments, but.)

But if your issues are … this? If your issues are that everything is not precisely the same as it was when you last formed a cultural thought? If your issues are that people just aren’t nice enough to you by giving you literally everything you want, and you can’t for a second think about anyone else, you don’t get to claim persecution to a degree that equals John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. Not in the middle of a deadly global pandemic caused by the person you thought would fight back against the food packaging changes.

Calm the fuck down. It’s just marmalade.

A.