I see you there with your baseball cap on. Several times, it's one that sports the MAGA logo. Other times, it shows support for your favorite sports team, unable to play in the current climate.
You love to talk about freedom.
Liberty is practically your middle name.
Yet, peaceful protests and a common call to decency rile you up faster than poking a hornets' nest.
You prefer to use the First Amendment like a call for your rights, for your freedom. Your freedom of speech. You protest change. Something that challenges your status quo. Lately, you've said you're oppressed.
No. A simple no on that.
Oppression is what many Americans' ancestors experienced as slaves. It is also using the 13th Amendment to disproportionately detain people of color as modern slaves, except we call them prisoners. Their crimes are petty. As if you. Being oppressed is when you have a visceral fear of being stopped for a tail light being out and charged with the crime of being black in America.
Oppression is hiding in bars which are raided by Vice. It’s pretending the romance of your life is your roommate because being gay is only recently accepted in a legal forum. Oppression is fear of rape that's inflicted to prove “it only takes the best dick to turn me straight.”
So, John and Karen, you're not oppressed.
Oppression isn't being asked to wear a mask during a global pandemic. Oppression isn't when other races ask for the same rights your race has. Moreover, oppression isn't when you finally treat other races as equal. And oppression is certainly not when LGBTQ+ couples obtain the same legal rights as cis heterosexual couples.
Black lives matter. Gay rights matter. And if you believed all lives mattered, you'd wear a mask throughout a global pandemic. But you don't wish to. Your rights, your rights! Right?
Well, your rights never left. Science simply won for any nanosecond and we are asked to wear masks to protect ourselves and others. You are mistaking inconvenience for oppression.
Wearing a mask is in no way a political issue. Furthermore, neither are basic human rights. Why, Karen, would you say the police officer was “just doing his job” when busting into an African American person's private home, yet wearing a piece of cloth on your face only while in public spaces is completely unjust? Oh, and people things called seatbelts – do you think that's oppression too, because they're required while driving?
It's not oppression. It is a minor inconvenience. A history lesson is needed, or perhaps a vocabulary lesson, when we are all allowed to return to school, so you can be educated on the difference.
In the meantime, please wear a mask. After all, don't “all lives matter?”
