So, like everyone these days, I was chatting with one of my circles of pals. You have them, I am sure. They come in batches of orientation. You know the ones played out nationally in some much higher visibility. I could go into them with the acronyms we use these days for convenience. I don’t have any transgender circles (that I know of, anyway) and if I am a member of any of the other ones, it is with higher priorities than what is bugging any of us individually on any given day. By blood, I am also disadvantaged, since my people were thrown out of mostly white Imperial nations. We don’t celebrate the anniversary of Culloden Field in Scotland when the King got rid of us, nor the Famine that cast us out of Ireland. Same King, a CISGENDER fellow, from what I hear. I can tell my special victim status from the genetic czars at 23-and-Me, including that one Hispanic sailor who swam ashore when the King’s Navy sank the ships of the Spanish invaders.

I can’t begin to figure out the acronyms I would use to describe the tortured societies that contributed to our family. ISOP? Irish-Scot Oppressed People? That would be pithy and short, but regrettably doesn’t seem to have the curb appeal of our President (POTUS) or our high court (SCOTUS). Using those terms makes you seem like you know what is going on. Or have forgotten what all the words mean. Doesn’t matter, and we have decided to pack or depose them anyway.

Our current crisis already has one, and we seem to be comfortable with it. COVID. A dread and scary abbreviation that seems to have the potential to have us all masked for the foreseeable future, at least until we banish Death, which is a word short enough to continue in some use. There should be a nice, short pithy term for the chaos of Western Society (CoWS?) but “having a CoW” is old shorthand, and perhaps not respectful enough to the enormity of whatever emergency our wise leaders declare is in progress in the moment. There was a time when we talked about these things before jumping immediately to the caboose of whatever crisis we need at the moment.

I mentioned back in March that I thought the plague and the election would be historic. It has been, regardless of where you stand on the issues. That is the one I think would be useful but might get assaulted by those who think this is just a sort of hyper normality, and if we just keep quiet it will all go back to something like what we knew as “Normal.” You know, death was there each year. You could go out to the funeral, and even have a drink or dinner in public without getting socked by some Karen about “endangering others.” It didn’t use to be like that, nor is there any indication that it will go away. I told one of my mostly Progressive (MP) circles that I had already heard about the impending systemic racial emergency, and the gun violence one, and the Green Crisis that will end life on the planet if we don’t do something right now. Like immediately, because “emergency.”

I toyed with a few new terms, ones that would capture the time when everything changed. “The way things were before” comes out TWTWB, which would be awkward, though accurate not having enough vowels to flow smoothly. We have really changed a lot. I tried to count the ways- grooming, of course, schools, alcohol consumption, “working” from “Home,” all the little things that make up- “made up” the fabric of our lives. I ran through several, looking for the right balance of consonants and round letters, but realized that it would quickly get political like everything else. I heard a professor (don’t know if he insisted on being called “Doctor”) being terminated for having an opinion. I used to think that was part of being an educator, but I am learning all the time. His offense was observing that anyone who stated their sex and preferred pronoun was also sending you a political message in shorthand. Thank God he was immediately fired.

So, the one I liked the best to describe modern society is also laden with a political message. It is hard to get around, though. What happened? The Overthrow of the United States of America. TOTUS.

Using it would save a lot of time, since we will be using it a lot about why things used to work one way, and now work in dramatically different ones. You know- before TOTUS. Oh, wait. Someone told me it means something in Latin, too. TOTUS Tuus, damn it!

– Vic

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com