Endgame: make all communication impossible
Oh, thank God they’ve taken care of this, eh? I mean, how could we possibly have gone on if the Nebraska mascot had continued to flash the OK sign?! Since we’ve been informed by the cultural commissars at the Southern Poverty Law Center that it’s no longer OK to signal OK and everything.
Do people even think for a second about what they are accomplishing when they do things like this?
So, somebody you don’t like takes a word, or an image, or a gesture that has long been understood to represent some inoffensive idea and starts using it among themselves as a symbol for something you don’t like. Or in fact, they don’t even have to be so using it. They may just be trolling you into believing they are doing that, in order to see what kind of stupid things you’ll do in response.
And instead of just ignoring this tiny group of idiots, you do just what they want and respond to this by ceding the word, or image, or gesture to them. You go “Well, I guess the word/image/gesture is yours now! No way we’re going to do something that everyone sane person on earth knows means ‘OK’ if there’s a chance that one crackpot somewhere will mistakenly read it as a white supremacist gesture because we’re just that terrified of ever being incorrectly perceived by anyone anywhere as morally impure!”
Do you really not know that you are giving them power they do not have and have no other way of acquiring in acting in such a stupid way?
How many people on earth would have known that some tiny group of idiots was using the OK sign to mean something not OK if the cretins in the mass media had not started screaming on all their platforms at the top of their lungs about this as soon as they heard of it?
I certainly would never have known about this, and even having once been informed, would have happily forgotten it had CNN not taken it as their mission to constantly remind me that I can never again use the OK sign without magically becoming a white supremacist, and no matter if the contents in my brain while I’m giving the OK sign consist of “OK.”
What the media convincingly demonstrate in acting like this is that they are dumber than the people they oppose, who must be laughing their rear ends off to see them dancing like puppets to this ridiculous tune.
Somewhere out there, an Internet troll is working up a fake white supremacist reappropriation of the term “How ya doin’?” You see, it turns out that in racist circles the symbolism works this way: The “h” in “How” stands for (what else?) “Hitler;” “Ya” is practically “ja,” which is necessary for “Jawohl, mein Fuhrer”; and the “g” in “doing” is dropped in sinister calculation to get the four letter “doin’” because the white supremacists are pointing to the coming Fourth Reich in which all bad things will come to pass.
The only morally possible response, of course, is to stop using the phrase and give it to them.
That’ll show ‘em!
This is why I don't watch or listen to news any longer, though I do read it because the last time I didn't pay attention to news--especially political--something really un-OK happened. Not that my attention is needed to keep the world on a sane path, but apparently a lot of others were following the same head-in-the-sand (ostriches don't really do that, btw, do they?) approach to the mast head of the country. Seriously, though, the news is becoming a joke, and sadly not a funny one.