TRIGGERED!

On the heels of a previous post about not hiding from stupid people, I wanted to take on a very dumb statement by a freelance journalist named Emmie Harrison-West.  She decided to delve into the realm of the absurd when she said, "Readers as a whole need to be given the choice to consent to delving into books with triggering themes."

Okay, here's a way to do that - figure out which book to pick up before actually reading it.

You see, what Emmie wants is for books to have "trigger warnings" when they deal with sensitive themes.  When I first heard about trigger warnings, I thought they were a bad joke, but it turns out that they're very real, and some folks are so super duper uber sensitive that they need someone to tell them that some of what is out there may make the want a binkie winkie or nappy wappy.

I'm sorry, but I will not be nice about this.  If that offends you, you are free to kindly fuck off, because this is a BIG step on the road to censorship(wait till you see my next post).  I don't care what the themes are that upset you - you are free to not read them rather than pretend everybody else should accept or care about it as much as you do.  If you're truly that concerned about being triggered by something, then I suggest you don't read.  Ever.

Hey, I get that we all have things in our past that upset us, but that does not give us the right to impose our sensitivity onto others.  We deal with it and strive to get past it, but we don't tell others they should have to deal with our traumas too.  Trigger warnings shout to the world how we can't handle something, and, by extension, the person reading may also not be equipped to handle it.  Grow the hell up.

The world is triggering.  If that makes you mad, then I suggest you hide under your bed and never come out, because the world can be a scary place.  But stop trying to impose your madness on the rest of us, for it will draw as ferocious a response as anything I've ever engaged with.