"a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,"
and, yeah, from the song, which I probably have to thank the Wonder Years for.
So, when I see this:
Even more unpopular opinion: Respected academics should watch their language in public. https://t.co/FiyZG4tUop— John Ibbitson (@JohnIbbitson) July 28, 2019
My response is to say: fuck that!
While I curse quite a bit at home (our daughter was cursing like a sailor long before she hit her late teen years), I almost never curse when I am teaching. When I started blogging and then tweeting ten years ago, I also avoided cursing. But something changed that produced not just the repeated FFS (where the profanity is only slightly hidden) but a more frequent appearance of Fuck! That would probably be the election of 2016. A quick check of my blog shows that most, not all, of the times I have used profanity (defined as fuck or shit but not FFS) have been since Trump began campaigning. Not all uses are related to Trump, but most.
Why? Because I am and have been fucking outraged! So much unnecessary bullshit that has harmed real people. These are not imagined casualties but an actual body count caused by Trump's incitement of violent, deliberate incompetence at the border and in Puerto Rico, and on and on. I find it outrageous for people not to be outraged at what has been going on in both US domestic and foreign policy.
And how to express outrage? By using profanity. These are not normal times, and we should not behave as if they are. While Emmett used it in reference to the Chateau Laurier expansion shit-show, his point was a larger one--that we are focused on this rather than the awful stuff going on not just in the US but in Canada with Quebec legislating against religious minorities and the Conservative Party being (dare I say it) infested with white nationalists (see Rebel media folks).
So, yeah, there is a time to dance and there is a time to fucking curse!
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