Sometimes I really hate being a straight, white, male (hereinafter referred to as “SWM”). No, not because of any of the bullshit that racists foist upon us because they don’t have the power over the rest of the population that their Klansmen grandfathers had. Nothing like that.
No, the reason I sometimes hate having these three traits is that it lets me see firsthand all of the hatred that people are suppressing in the name of political correctness. It saddens me profoundly. Not that they’re suppressing their hatred, you understand, but rather that it exists in the first place.
If some of you folks who don’t share in the SWM triad were privy to what I hear on a daily basis, you’d swear Strom Thurmond was still campaigning for president and that he has a devoted following of closet cases. It sickens me.
I have thirteen SWM coworkers. Of them, there are exactly three who have never uttered the word “nigger” in my presence. I also have two SBM coworkers. When one of them walks into the room, racist chat time abruptly ends (sometimes in the middle of a sentence), and suddenly the black man is their best friend. Fucking hypocrites.
This rant isn’t about racists, though. It’s about one sexist, asshole, piece-of-shit coworker who makes proclamations so bold that it makes even my jaw drop. Christ, I thought I’d heard everything. Not by a longshot…
This man has been arested twice in the last month for beating his wife and he’s proud of it! This is nothing new, either. In the five years I’ve held this job, I can’t count how many times he has missed work because he was in jail. Of course, the wife never presses charges, so he doesn’t go to prison and he gets to keep his job. Now, if he had been smoking a joint on the weekend and not hurting anyone, he’d be fired in a heartbeat. I guess that’s fodder for a different rant, though.
I have actually heard this man say “I’m sick of all these damn judges telling us we can’t hit our wives. We need to keep those bitches in line.” Seriously. He really said that. I’m not sure how, exactly, “his bitch” gets “out of line,” but I know it’s nothing serious. She doesn’t cheat on him like he does to her.
Speaking of cheating, I recall another of his rants that involved him getting caught naked in bed with another woman by his wife. (“Fucking bitch. We were just kissing. What’s her goddamned problem?”) :rolleyes: I guess that just because you weren’t physically in the act of coitus when she opened the door, that makes you an innocent bystander, right? What the fuck breeds this bizarre thought process?
I should also note that said asshole’s son is a 20-year-old recovering crackhead, who has so thoroughly wrecked his life that he can barely string two words together. I often wonder how much having a father like that contributed to his problems.
I keep telling myself that society is heading in the right direction and that my coworkers are throwbacks, sociological dinosaurs from a less tolerant America. I really hope I’m right. I also hope that their kids are able to see through the bullshit and learn to treat people with the respect that they should have had in the first place, but instead had to fight for.
