About #weird.
For most adults, most of the time, weird is at most a mild insult, and for many adults it's a compliment. "Yeah, I'm weird. You're weird. We're all weird here. All the best people are, you know." That kind of thing.
But for many *many* children, it's vicious. On the elementary school playground, weird is about the worst thing you can be. It lasts well beyond that, too, at least into high school. Even young adults—which I mean literally, old enough to drive and vote and get married—are often pretty exclusionary on the basis of perceived weirdness. I was one of those kids, and I bet a lot of people reading this were too.
So yeah, now that it's suddenly everywhere, *adult* adults calling each other weird and meaning it to cut ... I do feel a certain amount of childhood PTSD climbing out of the depths of my brain. Decent people accept that there are some insults we should never use, no matter what our opponents call us, and I kind of want this to be one of them.
I'll deal. Because I know that whatever dim ancient terrors it stirs up, memories of ostracism and beating and worse things I won't go into here, for its current targets it's scary as hell *right now*.
Bullies take it as an article of faith that their victims must never use their own tactics against them. Violence of the tongue and the fist are the exclusive province of those at the top of the ladder. The weirdos down on the bottom rungs ... how *dare* we? Don't we know our role is always to be the stepped on, never those who step?
Oh, we can call them hateful and cruel and evil. Those are insults, but they're also attributions of power. Let us hate them, so long as we fear.
Weird is powerless. Weird is helpless. Weird is the little kid at the corner of the playground crying because no one wants them on the team. Weird is tears of futile rage.
Victims fighting back *effectively* is their worst nightmare.
They go low, we go right down to the bone. Hateful and cruel and evil are clumsy punches, easily dodged and laughed at before they close in for the kill. Weird, of all things, has turned out to be the hidden razor blade, the cut that doesn't even sting until they see the blood on the ground.
You know, they're really weird that way.
