Kabopple's Awesome Awesomness

On the fourth I played out a long cherished fantasy, and shot every American I met.

As performance art goes I was very successful, my spree lasted all day and I only had two negative responses (out of nearly a hundred.) One white lady told me I ought to have "pre-informed consent" and I was "basically assaulting people," as though splashing a little water on someone is akin to performing a sexual act or invasive medical procedure. Hilariously, the only real negative consequence she could imagine is that I "might ruin someone's nice clothes." It was an interesting statement to make when it was 85 degrees and 100% humidity outside, during a season when it rains multiple times daily. Overall, she set a really creative example of someone using triggering reactionary buzzwords to pretend something playful and harmless was a horrific traumatic event, in an attempt to manipulate the feelings of others. As someone who has been victim of assault, I thought it was absolutely ridiculous and offensive to make light of something so serious by equating its circumstances to a prank.

Really the best thing to do is laugh at that sort of person. I can't imagine being so sensitive and sheltered, they're basically spoiled whining babies crying and making up lies to get their way. For the rest of the day, any time we would have some normal interaction with someone, my friend and I would joke that we "needed consent" or say "you basically just assaulted me" (like when handing someone a beer for example.) If she thinks a splash of water is horrible, she is really not gonna like what I do with my guillotine! (I also almost got shot by the fuzz for having a water gun! Classic stuff.)

OCR-A (1968) is probably best known as the font used for ISBNs.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.