Ride Trigger over the Sunset

     Let us consider the practice of language policing.  Getting bent out of shape about the use of a word that's offensive to some, but not to others.  "Triggered," a word that triggers me, making me think of times when I've seen terrible things in movies like Jaws and The Shining, images of war, bodies in documentary films about Vietnam and World War Two, dead of Hiroshima, the British soldier bulldozing a tangle of dead emaciated bodies into a pit, all these images never leaving my head, I welcome all of them, they are part of my piece of the collective memory of humankind.  To live a life, just try it, of guarding against being triggered seems a good way to never learn how to empathize with real suffering.

     A word sends back a memory, it's happened to me.  I have watched several films dealing with mental illness.  They triggered me; memories of psychiatric wards and their sometimes obtuse personnel, of Jurassic Park played at high volume, watched by dark blue-clothed (suicide watch color) men.  I wore their color, but after a week they gave me my jeans back, my shoelaces and belt once I learned graciousness towards the captors.

     Girl, Interrupted, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Lilith, Red Desert, all of them dealing with mental illnesses, mental hospitals, changing perceptions.  These films triggered me.  I took that in and breathed out the uncomfortable aspects of the memory triggers to accept the pain of what happened to me in 1993, 1994, and 2002.  Manic Depressive Illness.  "No joke," to borrow Joe "I'm Just a Regular Guy" Biden's phrase.

     I'm not presuming that everyone can react to triggers the way I do.  Some have deep, serious trauma complicated with many current life factors, like we're in a fucking pandemic and the government won't give the people Medicare for All, but Biden expanded the war budget even further to its greatest balloon- about-to-burst extent.  There's money to give to Mitch McConnell's wife and Nancy Pelosi's husband and Tom Brady so he can put an $89,000 down payment on his first yacht, but there's no way we can get a UBI and Medicare for All. 

     Does that kind of thing trigger you?  Life is a trigger.  Trigger is a horse, galloping proudly, guided by a sure hand.  Also, a word is not a bullet, so the word trigger doesn't fit what actually happens when someone gets offended by the use of a word.

     What does happen?  

     A cocktail party in Bel Air, 1950, white-gloved women wearing hats, they all know each other from the beauty parlor, from the studios, the parties, the charity events.  Their husbands are producers, actors, art directors, directors, and one of their donkeys is a movie star in his own right.

     This modernistic Bel Air house has a triangular swimming pool with a dark eye painted on the bottom, a wavering eye symbolizing its Mason owner, a prominent actor who once kissed Greta Garbo.  Well-connected, he attends J. Edgar Hoover's dress-up parties at which President Lyndon Johnson can sometimes be seen, accompanied only by his favorite henchman, Rodney "Head Shot" Champlain.

     Back at the Bel Air party, a white-gloved woman named Rhonda says, "After all, my father's in the KKK.  It's really a charity.  The letters stand for Kind, Kinder, Kindest."

     Does that absurd story trip triggers?

     I'm not telling anybody how to use language, but trying to limit people's words is a shitty thing to do to someone--imposition of your hang-up about a word on someone else.  Try saying the word you don't like a thousand times.  It will lose all meaning, sounding eventually like a percussion instrument.  Start a band, new album coming out Tuesday, I've Untriggered Myself!

     I know it's not simple, I'm making light of it.  Humor, though, is a tonic for those who feel triggered and need warnings.  Part of me says it's people not letting their minds grow up.  The world is a horrifying place.  India's going through the biggest Covid-19 infection and death rate in the world these days.  Our government continues the War on Terror, now on its fourth president, someone determined to make it go on.  

     "I like Dick Cheney," said Joe Biden, for real.  Warmongers praising each other without journalistic pushback triggers me.

     I get triggered, too, when people come into my place of work, sloppy about how they wear or don't wear masks.  I have to tell grownups to wear their masks properly.  

     It doesn't affect my life negatively that people get freaked out by certain words holding personal associations for them, though not for me.  Everyone I've spoken with about this has different views, different words they don't like although there's large agreement on specific words.  

     I don't like the sound of the word fecal.  Fecal matter.  Yeah, that sounds better than "shit," not really.  

     I don't want to ban the word fecal, nor do I wish to ban any word; I'm not afraid of them.

     

Vic Neptune