A few days ago something happened that annoyed me.

I forget what it was exactly but within minutes I realized my reaction to it was WAY inappropriate for the times.

In case you haven’t noticed,  if you bother to watch the Talking Heads or read the online/paper based Anointed Pundits ranting about (insert your topic here), no one seems to have any emotional response to ANYTHING anymore but OUTRAGE.

I remember the old days.  Way back then, if someone said some shit to you that you didn’t like or maybe you read something online or saw something on the Tube to which you took exception, your reaction may have run the gamut of emotions from disappointment or mild annoyance to just plain annoyance (never quite sure what the differentiator was there – I just knew I could tell the difference), or you might have felt Slightly Pissed Off to Full Blown Pissed Off.  You may have even internally escalated things to the point of feeling Anger, or, if you’re the type that hears voices in your head, plain old unhealthy Rage

(Of course, in an alternate universe you may even just have ignored the whole thing but I don’t want to get off topic here.)

No, today’s standard, nay expected, reaction to things said, events that occur, gestures made , eyebrows furrowed, quizzical looks, differences of opinion – pretty much anything with which you disagree – is OUTRAGE.

Don’t like it that you were stopped by a cop for having a tail light or license plate missing AND were then found to have a pound of crystal meth in your trunk along with a decapitated body?  Well, if you’re 1/10th Inuit Indian on your father’s side, the media story will likely start with the headline, “Minority Person OUTRAGED Over Police Profiling.”

Don’t like waiting in line for your turn at the trough in the Men’s Room at Wrigley Field? Push your way through the even longer suffering line waiting in front of the Women’s Room, declare yourself Transgender, get into a fight with a patient WWW contender, get arrested and you get the headline, “LGBTQ (What’s with the Q?  Isn’t that redundant or does is stand for Questionable?)  Person OUTRAGED Over Denial of Access to Women’s Room’.

Got an annual income of a gazillion dollars, you own Ecuador, and find your Property Taxes have increased by $10,000?  Call a like minded individual who controls the media in your locale (or Mark Zuckerberg who apparently controls ALL media in ALL locales through Facebook – Russian subsidiaries included) and you get a headline, “Friend of Gabillionaire OUTRAGED Over Friend’s Property Tax Increase.”

Live in a ‘Geographically Disadvantaged Urban Boundary Owned by Absentee Owners and Populated by Poor Minorities With a 250% Increase in Gun Deaths’  and get capped by a cop while you’re reloading an Uzi which you just emptied at the cop and for some unknown reason you’re such a rotten shot you completely missed him/her?  Inevitably your headline will read “Father Pfleger (or whomever is your local defender of all that’s good and holy) OUTRAGED Over Unjustified Police Shooting of Future Assumed Rhodes Scholar”.

The examples cited of course incorporate some of today’s hot button issues and are in some respects perhaps a bit hyperbolic 🙂 ; however the term OUTRAGE is now being used to describe reactions to even the most mundane of situations considered as newsworthy and reported as such by today’s media.

If you don’t believe that,  simply take out a blank piece of paper and  for the next two weeks every time you hear or read about someone being OUTRAGED about something place a tick mark on it.   I’m betting you’ll find yourself AMAZED at the results, by which time you may find the media has discovered  people are becoming less OUTRAGED and more AMAZED!  Who knows?

Thank you for reading today’s diatribe.  I actually feel EMPOWERED having written it!

…..and now about that word EMPOWERED…..

AS PROMISED – ONE OTHER THOUGHT

Having been bombarded lately with the Saga of Stormy Daniels As Translated From the Old English I find it one of today’s extreme ironies that a woman who spent much of her adult life making money doing porn movies received what was undoubtedly her biggest payday – for actually keeping her mouth shut!

Think about it.