We have to be living in a satirical movie right? I keep reading articles or watching news clips/interviews that I'm certain must be humorous takes on actual events, perhaps derived from such august sources as 'The Onion' or 'The Babylon Bee,' but no, they are real! How people can think and say or carefully consider such ideas with a straight face is beyond me. I just finished reading an article in the alumni magazine from my alma mater and I can't decide whether to laugh aloud or weep in despair, my college was a little, how shall I put this, edgy?, back in the late '90's, so you can probably imagine how it has devolved since then. It was a serious article featuring a person whose preferred pronoun was plural and a project they were working on for the 'pronounedly confused' or whatever the politically correct jargon is for folk who don't like he/she. As a writer I would love a gender neutral singular pronoun but that is beside the point, this person refers to themselves(?) in the plural tense. For a bit there I thought I had slipped into one of those sci-fi novels where a certain alien species is part of a hive mind or multiple minds occupy a single organism, etc! This is really getting weird. Am I the only person on the planet that finds this trend more than a little disturbing?
Where do you draw the line? What is normal, healthy, acceptable and what is dangerous, unhealthy, unacceptable? Is anorexia okay because the individual identifies as a fat person no matter their actual weight? Is a person with multiple personality disorder a murderous fiend if one or more personalities are banished/suppressed if treatment is sought? What's next? If biological gender can be considered contentious and mutable, what other natural 'laws' will we also feel free to flout in our search for meaning, importance, and significance? How does law and order exist at all in a world where everything is dependent on feelings? What if my feelings contradict yours, whose should get predominance? How do we know what reality is? Whose reality is real? What is a person? What is not a person? Does a person have rights? Where do they come from? Who can take them away or grant them? Does the individual or the crowd have more rights? Which is right? Is anything wrong?
It's a very slippery slope into philosophical chaos and not much further into social unrest. What do you cling to when nobody believes anything or everything? But these aren't new questions, men (yes, in the old fashioned sense meaning humankind inclusively no matter your favored pronoun) have been asking them since the dawn of time; we've just applied them to things no one was ever silly enough to question before (sort of like most Ph.D. theses). And the answer is always the same, no matter what age of the world you find yourself in: a paradox, an enigma, foolishness. 'For the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men.' And I'm right, this reality is a spoof, a parody, a distortion of what is actually real, and one day we will wake up and find it all an absurd, horrid dream and our real lives will begin in a world we cannot even begin to fathom, but we must become fools, at least in the eyes of the world, if ever we hope to get there.
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