I heard the slur “snowflake” about twenty years or so, during the Bush junior administration when it became popular to insult non-Republicans with verbiage that has no meaning. That said, I’d like to talk to you about the Snowflakepocalypse.

To quote a famous classic film, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”

“Real” Americans think they’re tough. They’re the Chuck Norris of Americans, the kick your ass for doing nothing after you leave a bar. There’re the Clint Eastwood of Americans, shoot you in the face when you’re lying on the ground. They’re the John Wayne of Americans, making racist and sexist remarks all of their lives and still expecting to be beloved by the world for their moral superiority. Yeah, they’re tough. They’re real men (and real women that love real men and wear lots of makeup). Yeah, they’ll all that.

Except when they’re not.

(Which is, apparently, most of the time these days).

In States around the country people who love using the slur “snowflakes” are pushing through laws all because of their hurt feelings. Oh my, you scared me, I feel threatened, I must kill you now—put it into law! Oh no, I’m feeling uncomfortable around you, it’s your shirt/pronoun/laundry detergent, I’ve gotta keep your books out of my library now—write it in stone! Yes, folks, all over America the Chucks and the Clints and the bloody John Waynes of the world are behaving like two year olds convinced someone’s going to steal their juice boxes because they got looked at wrong. Yeah, you heard it hear folks, right wing American conservative republicans are…oh, my French…pussies.

I have two concrete examples from the past week.

My wife and I were driving around the area around the area around South West Portland last weekend and in one burgeoning semi-rural area there was sign after sign for people running for the local school board. It was unprecedented. She didn’t really know what it was about, but it was clear as crystal to me (reminds me, I now own a crystal decanter so sometime this three day weekend it’ll be time to pickup some much needed Scotch for my juice box) that the race was on between normal, decent people, and bigots who are crying about their goddamn juice boxes. Actually, it’s not so much their juice boxes but other peoples’: they don’t like that other people have juice boxes so they want to ban juice boxes from the planet. And they’ll start by taking LGBTQ+ and any book suggesting race might exist (except when brought up in the context of us white-good-folk putting an end to the American Civil War) out of every library in their city/county/state/country. The end result? In the city/county I grew up in two of the existing members of the school board lost to two mothers (word retracted) who are addicted to this idea that their children might get rickets or AIDs or some other fatal disease by being exposed to books containing sentences about the experiences of other human beings. Yes, it’s happening folks, 1930’s Germany, in real time.

Example #2: In the town of Klamath Falls, which is in southern Oregon, free citizens were holding a book club to discuss books about race. They library had to temporarily halt this because people claiming much louder to be free Americans said, “You can’t do that, we’re free Americans, and we say so.” No, we’re not talking about children that might be exposed to disgusting descriptions of people wearing the clothes they want to, these are adults telling other adults what they can and cannot read and talk about in a public library!

(Nazi Germany, 1930’s. There’s even a movie about what happened to the White Roses, who stood up to this kind of thing back then. “Off with their heads!” Something I think right wingers would support in this day and age—if and when they can get away with it. Look it up. There’s even a movie [for those of you who are afraid of libraries].)

For me the irony of all this, beyond the simple fact that the tough guys, the freedom fighters for our American Constitution, aren’t just the loud cry babies, they’re also the cry babies denouncing cancel culture. I mean, when’s the last time you’ve seen a liberal try to take away your right to read a book or god forbid, vote? Maybe you’ve heard about those examples on Fox News and ilk, but it just doesn’t happen in real life. It doesn’t jive with (fucking) reality or any liberal I’ve ever spoken with. That’s not to say liberals and progressives (the latter club of which I’m amicable to being in) don’t want certain things to stop. We’d, for instance, like men to stop getting away with swatting female coworkers on the ass and calling them “honey” (oh yeah, we’ve more or less canceled that, yeah!). We’d like to put a stop to modern Jim Crow laws that prevent poor, colored, and/or minority people from voting or being involved in civil policy making. We’d like to put a stop to billionaires and millionaires owning politicians (can anyone point out a single liberal/progressive that’s for Citizens United? That’s a whole conservative supported Supreme Court decision). Yeah, we left wing tree huggers do cancel culture from time to time, but it’s the culture of anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-agism, and all the other ‘isms that allow the status quo of only white middle class and above men to run this country and pretend it’s freedom for all.

If you ask me, and if I haven’t made it clear already, the bigots are out in force. Their feelings have been butt hurt and they’re going to get even, set things straight, “Make America Great Again” (a saying that literally goes back to the KKK of the 1920’s). They’ve come up with a whole new and acceptable form of bigotry where they claim the gays and them negroes and everyone else who doesn’t dress like them and pray like them and vote like them isn’t American. It’s the same playbook from the twenties, when FDR saved the country from itself (and they hated him for it), and the same crap we heard from the south during and after our greatest (to date) war against ourselves. And it is dumb, but it really does all come down to butt-hurt-cry-baby mania. They don’t like anyone else having what they do so they’ve completely convinced themselves the liberals, the gays, them negroes, the Jews (oh, can’t say that anymore!), and so on, are after them. Indeed, I have a friend on Facebook that’s convinced of this, but not one time have I limited his free speech or ability to vote despite our gross differences of opinion—and I can’t say he’s ever done the same for me (or my ilk).

Fascist politics and belief systems have not changed much over the last one hundred years.

As a teenager I scarfed down books about people that were nothing like me. I never became gay. I never became black or latino. Hell, I didn’t even find myself thrust upon with an unwanted personal pronoun. Indeed, if anything, I just became more open minded, accepting, understanding, and supportive of the objectives of liberal democratic ideas in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. My butt did not hurt. I mean it does hurt—but from Lyme—and that’s a completely different story!

But their butts hurt. They must really hurt. And they’re making it known. Just look at Governor DeSantis who’s making it against the law to make any white Floridian feel butt hurt. Yes, there’s a law being put in place—as we speak—to outlaw middle class white butt hurt.

And I’m the snowflake?

Grow the fuck up.

…asm…