A Truth Universally Acknowledged.

 

Have you heard about this Supreme Court case where a high school girl got kicked off her cheer squad because she posted a Snap saying, “Fuck cheer”?

She said other stuff too, but apparently it was the “vulgar language” that got her in trouble.

Now it has made it all the way to the Supreme Court as a first amendment issue.

The whole thing is so dumb that it makes me angry. 

I’m not like some crazy free speech advocate of anything, but this is just so clearly a situation where a teenager was being a teenager and adults who are accustomed to having power overstepped their authority because what is a teenager going to do about it?

This is the kind of thing I think about in the mornings when I write these blog posts for noone to read. There was a time when if you Googled the phrase “Republicans are terrible” this blog would show up on the first page of results. I write about my life here and what it is like to live my life and I have always been comfortable doing that because I really don’t care. I know who I am and what I’m like and for the most part I am okay with all of it. I’m not really trying to hide anything and — as you can clearly tell by now — I’m not trying to make myself look cool.

I have always been surprised by the low key but ever present pressure of adulthood to stay quiet and to not confess to anyone that you are in fact a person existing in the world and not to admit that doing so is hard. This is especially present in professional life. More than once while job searching people have suggested I delete this blog and I was always of the opinion that, simply, I wasn’t willing to give up this part of myself for a paycheck. The first time I met my current Dean he said, “I’ve seen your website,” and I was all embarrassed only because I hadn’t updated it in a long time.

In all my years of adulting, if this blog or the stories I’ve published or the dumb cartoons I draw have ever caused anyone to look at me funny and say, “Well that is just not proper behavior” I have never heard about it. I have no doubt people have said such things, they’ve just never felt strongly enough about it that I ever had to hear about it.

So now imagine being this teenager who did — essentially — the same thing I am doing right now and having to fight that kind of lunatic idiocy all the way to the Supreme Court. I think her legal team should take a real close look at her cheer coach’s Facebook page, as it is a truth universally acknowledged that all gym teachers were present at the January 6th terrorist attack.

This is all a pretty roundabout way of saying that what we should all be doing in life is applying to those in power the standards that they seek to apply to us. I think everybody would calm way the hell down about basically everything if it was somehow clear that the same standard is applied to all of us.

Obviously the reason we don’t do that is because the same standard is not, in fact, applied to all of us. There are people with money and people who are pretty and people who are tall and people who are white and people who have power and the yardstick used to measure a person seems to shrink or grow depending on who is standing next to it.

So stay tuned to the cheer girl’s upcoming Supreme Court case, we might get to see if any of that will be changing anytime soon. I’m not going to bet any money on it.

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