This year’s Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer, is Sept. 7. I never thought I would say this, but if I had school-age children I would have said it mid-July – I am so ready to have this summer of 2015 end.
Of course the end of June was a joyous victory for federal marriage equality, and we partied like we were the Secret Service. But our joy that day was tempered by the violence in Charleston, S.C.
Summer has been endless.
July was a brutal, steamy march in the ongoing war on women. ISIS, divinely inspired by its own “theology of rape,” continued enslaving and raping women. A high school senior, and would-be divinity student, was tried for allegedly raping a freshman girl to boost his scores in the school’s so-called ‘Senior Salute.’ Anti-choice terrorists started another video assault in the unrelenting campaign to shut down Planned Parenthood. Bill Cosby.
August was spent binge-watching the Armageddon. The cliffhanger in each week’s episode was, “Is this the week The Donald will finally blow up and go away?”
One week, Trump insults immigrants in language profane and inhumane. That ought to do it! No. His crowds love him. Almost as much as he loves himself. And he wants a wall at the border.
Next week, he insults the heroism of John McCain and veterans. Oh no he didn’t! He’s toast! No. The crowds grow larger. As does his red hat.
Then a woman, a fair and balanced Fox debate moderator, calls him out for calling women pigs and fat slobs. He replies by insulting women who bleed from he’s not sure where. She’s fired! Or sent on an unplanned two-week vacation. Trump is pig-slob triumphant.
Trump has made himself the anger translator for the downtrodden whom he trod down. And he has made the rabid Republican Teahaddist also-rans look like moderate choirboys and choirgirl.
He has made me start swearing like a sailor again. And I mean no insult to sailors, especially any women trying to become Navy Seals.
I have not sworn like this since Bush, the Most Recent, stole the election. Or since he invaded Iraq and started the cascading Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS shit-storm, which should have put him in fucking jail by now.
See what I mean? If I’m swearing like this in print, you can imagine what hashtag hell it’s like in person.
Both my dear partner and I are trying to ramp down the language. But it is hard to give up the word ‘fuck.’ That one-syllable word with the opening fricative F sound, the middle ‘uhn’ sound and the voiceless plosive K sound at the end is so satisfying. Fucking is so satisfying. We don’t want to be pills against women’s sexual arousal.
Most of August we have tried alternatives. There are none. No single syllable words anyway. And certainly not the ‘effing’ or ‘fecking’ variants.
We are trying to use our words. Instead of saying ‘fuck’ we have been substituting ‘white privilege.’ When Trump does something outrageous, every day, instead of a neck-vein popping, “What the fuck?” we say, “What the white privilege?”
During September, instead of saying ‘shit,’ we are going to practice substituting ‘class struggle.’ Instead of “Shit happens,” we’ll say, “Class struggle happens.”
Fall can’t happen soon enough.