The Heart of Man is A Crushed Horse's Tail

I had a thought yesterday at work about how men and women (I’ll add non-binary people to this, too) adjust to being uncomfortable. One of my co-workers seems to be uncomfortable with the head of our department. He’s not the most hygienic—constantly chewing on a straw, washes his hands infrequently if ever, his desk is grimey, he constantly has spilled food on his clothes. He lives in a world where COVID doesn’t exist, which is currently an issue when the variant is ravaging the country, so it took me months to adjust how close he gets when he wants to talk to you. Not to mention he recently caught COVID a few weeks ago. This co-worker had no issue being blunt about how uncomfortable he was with him touching his paperwork or getting near him without a mask. He bluntly stated “Don’t get near me without a mask!” or “Stop touching everything on my desk!” I can’t imagine being this blunt with anyone if I found myself in an uncomfortable scenario.

I know I’m not preaching to the choir when I say women and non-binary people have to adjust their boundaries constantly to please other people. It’s a societal thing, the whole idea that the population who aren’t men need to make men feel comfortable to feel somewhat safe and even then safety isn’t guaranteed. The white, cis male has a fragile ego, soft feelings, a delicate core. God forbid once in their lives they experience one iota of discomfort in their lives. It’s why many of them scream about cancel culture, “SJWs”, Liberals, Communists, Millennials, etc.—groups who are challenging the privileges they have been afforded since the beginning of time. They don’t want it to go away. They still want to be praised for mediocrity, bowed down to when they walk into a room, their dicks sucked on command.

With the amount of pain, strife, and destruction they have inflicted on the world, they know the amount of discomfort the rest of us walk around with to make them feel safe and cozy in their monochromatic microcosms. It’s why they can go into work and not care about the kind of job they do because they know their job is not in jeopardy or they treat people they consider beneath them poorly because they know there is no retaliation or consequence waiting in the wings. They’ve done a good job making everyone else fearful of them that they have managed to stay in power, but as we become more educated, the more they get scared so they claim there’s a conspiracy in the world against them when all it is is them getting a taste of their own medicine.