Diabetes vs. Dead Babies - Neither Is Really All That Funny

So, for the past several days something has been bugging me, and I think I finally figured out the reasons why. Last weekend, one of my friends posted a meme about Krispy Kremes donuts being 'diabetes in a box'.

Not the actual image, but close enough.

I didn't think the joke was funny, because I thought it was played out, over done, lacking any sort of creativity or novelty (though it did make me want a donut). However, one of his friends objected, because they felt it was insensitive to her diabetic son. Part of her argument, of course, was that Type 1 diabetes is in no way the result of diet. Others have argued that type 2 diabetes may also have no association at all with diet, as this blog post with absolutely no citations will tell you (if it weren't nearing 7am, I'd look for a more credible source like the one my friend posted with his apology). In that case, the meme was not medically accurate, so a retraction would certainly be warranted, as well as an apology to Krispy Kreme.

But she was offended on behalf of her son, not on behalf of the maligned corporation. She claimed that diabetic individuals are a marginalized population, and that the post was insensitive towards them because it contributed to their stigmatization. That seemed like a stretch. I come from a family where diabetes is very common and treated as a near-inevitability with age that's simply staved off with good diet and exercise (I will likely be diagnosed with it younger than most of my family members). The claim that diabetics are stigmatized seems like a stretch, since I have never - not once - heard any of my family members complain about being marginalized. I talked to my mother on the phone about it that night and she laughed at the notion and expressed incredulity.

One could argue that my family suffers from internalized stigma because they've bought into the misinformation, but the understanding is pretty clear in my family that one box of donuts will not cause diabetes, and no one has been especially self-deprecatory about their diabetic status or closeted about it. It is what it is and it's extremely common - something has to kill us eventually, and until then it's just a matter of doing what we can to keep our extremities attached. One could argue that my family (mom included) just happens to be oblivious to the stigma they face, but in the context of any other marginalized group that suggestion would be a joke - if you can somehow 'miss' that you're stigmatized in society, it's difficult to believe that your group is all that stigmatized.

[Though, I will admit that the way the woman who complained to my friend talked about diabetics made me feel that type-2 diabetics - like those in my family - may be stigmatized within the diabetic community, since her complaint pointedly emphasized respect for the distinction between the two types.]

Offensive Is As Offenders Do?

Maybe it was offensive to diabetics, maybe it wasn't. As a pre-diabetic I wasn't offended, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. At the time I primarily voiced skepticism that an apology for the Krispy Kreme meme was necessary, because I felt that the burden of responsibility placed on the person apologizing was unreasonable - we can't be responsible for offending people when our offenses require unreasonable associative leaps to be seen as offensive. I suggested numerous examples of places where that's problematic (e.g., men's right activists being offended anytime feminists talk about anything that's not men's rights, and vice versa).

I specifically recalled an incident in which my wife (apparently) upset an elderly widow at a nearby table by using her phone during a quick brunch. The woman had interrupted our meal and publicly shamed my wife in front of the rest of the people in the restaurant for not paying enough attention to me. I said that while the woman may have been genuinely offended, the fact was that my wife was sitting quietly minding her own business, and shouldn't be expected to apologize for that (which, actually, she did), because the leap the woman had taken to be offended was unreasonable. That example then led to me being told that we should have expressed our condolences to the widow (which, actually, we did), that we shouldn't have been offended because the woman meant well (double standard, much?), and that I clearly lacked empathy for being offended that a stranger had felt entitled to insert herself into our lives that way.

Dead Babies Are Funny?

After my friend made a public apology for the donut joke, the next thing he (the one who said I lacked empathy) posted on Facebook was a link to a news article publishing a long list of tweets cyberbullying the mother of an unvaccinated child who'd gone to Twitter seeking help in the face of a measles outbreak. Most of the tweets published in the article consisted of comments like, "I hope you didn't get attached" or "I hope you didn't name it yet."

I (the one without empathy) raised disbelief that this sort of thing was somehow praiseworthy to my friend, who'd just the day before apologized for the Diabetes Donut Debacle and asserted that he liked to think of himself as "a fairly sensitive guy." My friend was very annoyed at the "minor discrepancies" I had pointed out in his choices, and defended his choice to post the article. Apparently, the Twitter cyberbullying and public shaming were not insensitive because:

1. The jokes were made at the mother's expense rather than the child's (kind of like making jokes about Krispy Kreme isn't the same as making jokes about diabetics?). 
2. The mother - statistically - was *probably* an antivaxxer rather than the mother of a child who couldn't be vaccinated for medical reasons (about 1 in 18 unvaccinated children are unvaccinated due to medical exemptions rather than philosophical objections, which doesn't seem like a "slim, slim chance" or a "very, very small percentage" to me).
3. Parents "are given free access to all the information they need, in fact it's often shoved at them, about the importance of vaccination" so there is no excuse for someone falling for the antivaxxer fear mongering (despite the fact that parents have also had free information shoved at them by that fear-mongering campaign, and by the loudest, most influential voice in our country and the media chorus that's helped politicize it).
4. Unvaccinated kids are a huge health problem and we need to do everything we can to persuade antivaxxers they're wrong (I'm sure sharing dead baby jokes with provaccine friends is really effective in that regard).

No one responded to his thread with suggestions that the Twitter cyberbullies could have asked why the woman's child was unvaccinated before attacking her. None of them asked why the people responding to the woman didn't just say 'Vaccinate your child' and move on. And no one pointed out that vaccinations take weeks to kick in, so even if the woman did go out and vaccinate her child immediately, it would be too late to help in her present circumstances - effectively, her three year old was now on death-row, with only the die roll of fate to save her.

Instead his other friends just laughed at the woman's public humiliation and jokes about the deaths of unvaccinated children, and defended his choice to promote it. Somehow, for objecting to their merriment, I was again the unempathetic one - I guess I wasn't empathizing with the bullies...? (Though to be fair, the last comment to that effect was removed about an hour later.)

But here's the reason this has stuck in my throat for days - despite the fact that I (supposedly) am insensitive and lack empathy, compassion, respect for my fellow human being, or the ability to 'take and understand other people's perspectives', generally speaking, I DON'T POST SHIT LIKE THAT.

I went back through all of my 2019 Facebook posts, and while a lot of them are commenting on political or ideological issues, the closest any of them really come to mockery were some comments about our 45th president (e.g., questioning his parentage and needing to see his birth certificate) and this image that I shared:

I apologize to any pugs this image may have distressed by my post.

Why? For some reason I just don't find humor in the suffering or humiliation of real people. Sometimes I laugh at the misfortune of fictional characters (though often I do not - it's why I leave horror movies depressed) and I have only occasional discomfort gunning down NPCs in a FPS or stabbing them in Assassin's Creed, but when it comes to real people, human suffering - realized or imminent - doesn't seem funny. I still feel frustrated when people do things that are foolish, and I feel vindicated when they pay the consequences, but I guess I just don't usually find it *funny* - even less so when it's someone else (like an unvaccinated child) who will pay the cost.

Maybe I'm just not a funny person.

Compassion When It's Convenient

One thing that struck me out of all of the arguments the past few days is at some point my friend said something like 'we should have respect and compassion for those who deserve it' (I'd provide the exact quote, but the thread that it was in has been removed from Facebook).

So, basically, his attitude in that conversation was that we should respect the people that... we respect? That's more tautology than morality - you could just as easily boil it down to, "It's okay for me to bully this person because I want to bully this person." It has the window dressing of progressive thought, but at the end of the day it's just a thin veneer of social justice applied to the decision each of us makes about whose feelings we care about and how much we care about them.

Don't get me wrong, that decision is a necessary one, but most of the people who are keen to tell you 'we should respect and care about every human being' will immediately turn around and start applying qualifiers for who gets included in that protected category. I can accept that this sort of social triage is an ugly and biased process, but I rankle at the hypocrisy common in its implementation.

Stupid Shaming

Within my social circles, the criteria for exclusion is essentially one of intellect. If a person's ailments, failures, under-achievements, or mistakes can be (even partly) attributed to societal oppression, disability, or genetic predisposition, then they are clearly victims of circumstance, not accountable for their situation, and should not be mocked (which is perfectly reasonable). However, if their failures are perceived to be due to intellectual disadvantages or ignorance then their mistakes make them fair game for any harassment up to and (for some people) including death threats (levied against high school students), and a storm of comments to the effect of 'I don't condone death threats, but I totally condone these death threats'.

This was in response to an article about a Catholic boys school receiving threats.

People often make overly confident assumptions about the person they're mocking, assuming stupidity before circumstantial limitations (e.g., assuming the woman with the unvaccinated child is an antivaxxer, despite there being a better than 5% chance she wasn't), but even if that weren't the case, would it be okay to do so? Intellect and competence are very much a product of factors like upbringing and mental functioning, neither of which are wholly under a person's control. If it's okay to expect that everyone should just choose to be smarter, then it seems strange to get upset when someone says that a person should choose to be more thick-skinned. If it's not okay to disrespect 'touchy' people for their emotional vulnerability, why is it okay to disrespect stupid people for their intellectual vulnerability?

I don't deny that some people are idiots, but I tend to either pity them or to be frustrated by them, rather than thinking they're funny. I'm sure that (somehow) means something terrible about me.

Maybe I'm just too sensitive.

I Am Not Nice (But Maybe That's Okay)

Life has given me a lot of reasons to think about myself as a person and how I came to be who I am. With a child on the way, I've spent an incredible amount of time worrying over whether or not I can be a good father and raise a good person, given my jaded, cynical world view. I've spent a lot of time thinking about my own childhood and the challenges my child will face in theirs.

Throughout my childhood, empathy was one of my biggest problems. Not a failure to feel it, but an incredible excess of it and an inability to manage those feelings. Anytime I thought I'd done someone some harm, no matter how small, it felt like the end of the world. I apologized for everything, and generally felt like garbage about 100% of the time. I started thinking about suicide as soon as I understood the concept of death, because I was completely certain the world, and the people closest to me most of all, would be better off if I weren't in it.

In my childhood cartoons, I eventually ended up more interested in the villains than the heroes. It wasn't because I wanted to be villainous, and to do evil things but because I already felt like that was who I was and what I was fated to be. That being the case, I admired the villains' ability to be okay with who they were. 

Skeletor was the iconic example - underneath the terrifying visage, there was a guy who'd rescue children and puppies,  but did so knowing that at the end of the day he'd still be the 'bad guy' and he was okay with that.   

There's actually a Facebook page with over 250,000 followers devoted to appreciating and embracing oneself through Skeletor-themed daily self-affirmations, so at least I'm not alone, right?

Megatron (Transformers: Beast Wars), Mr. Freeze (Batman the Animated Series), Dr. Doom (Spider-Man the Animated Series), and David Xanatos and his beloved wife Fox (Gargoyles) were all comfortable with who they were, and did what they thought was right, even if what they thought was right wasn't necessarily heroic. Sometimes villains like Boba Fett (Star Wars: Expanded Universe) even seemed like better people than the heroes they were in opposition to (remember - Han Solo is a drug smuggler and terrorist who physically harassed one of his female passengers with unsolicited sexual advances). I didn't often share the villains' assessments of what was right and moral, but I admired their unwavering sense of self.

How could I find that sort of ego admirable? Because it kept them safe. On top of my own mental health issues, there was no shortage of people who would want to capitalize on my vulnerabilities. In elementary school boys would hold up an "L" and call me a loser (or pin me to a wall and punch me repeatedly). In high school they spit on me getting off the bus (but no punching, so a win over all). But by college the bullies had changed - they were much more savvy when it came to psychology. They'd buddy up to me, pretend to be my friend, and then slowly poison me with their own toxic narcissism - and when that gag was played out, they'd just start trying to sabotage or humiliate me in more forward ways.

The problem is, guilt is always my Achilles heel, and that's not hard to figure out. I avoid social situations as much as possible because I'm hyper-sensitive to the possibility of upsetting someone with the wrong choice of words; I should probably have a "social anxiety" diagnosis because of it. Despite my mother's advice, my instinct is still to be a 'people pleaser', and there are a remarkable number of people in the world who are willing to leverage that quality in order to further their own goals or to simply entertain themselves at your expense.

One of the easiest games for people like that to play is to find a way to be offended by just about anything you say or do, keeping you in a constant state of apology and contrition. People like to feel powerful, and coercing apologies for dubious offenses is a good way to satisfy that desire. Ever see someone raise hell at a restaurant, treating their server like crap and then complaining loudly to the manager over some ridiculous slight? That's why (well, that and the free desert); it's a power trip.

Unfortunately, that creates a significant dilemma for people like me. See, I was persuaded by one of my high school Latin teachers that it didn't matter what you actually did or said to upset someone - all that mattered was that someone said that they were upset. Whether or not something I did was "offensive" or wrong was purely a function of whether someone said it offended or wronged them. In taking on that mindset, I gave up what power I had to reflect upon and judge the morality of my own actions, and gave that power over to my tormentors - both those I had to interact with face-to-face everyday, and those I interacted with incidentally on social media and websites. When your mental health status puts you at persistent risk of suicide, that can be deadly.

So I had to cope with the world as best I could. My mom admonished me as a child not to apologize for problems that weren't my fault, and told me "you can't please everybody all the time." One of my colleagues in graduate school told me I needed to remember that I am not responsible for everyone else. My best friend told me I needed to learn to 'turn it off' occasionally for the sake of sanity.

I couldn't become completely callous towards others - or at least, if I could I didn't want to be. I still wanted to feel a basic sense of compassion towards others, and I still do (enough so that I can't watch a horror movie without getting horribly depressed), but I dumped the notion that the morality of my actions is both somehow subjective to the observer and yet totally determined by the observer for me.

Simply put, if someone tells me that something has wronged them - or, more often, that something would (hypothetically) be offensive to someone else - I don't take their word for it anymore. I don't challenge their assertion that they feel wronged, but I do think about whether it is really reasonable for that person to feel wronged (either directly or vicariously), and I react based on that determination. If your grievance seems sincere and reasonable, I'll be embarrassed and apologize or join you in condemning whoever upset you, but if it seems like you're having to make associative leaps to connect my actions to your distress (or your belief that someone else would be distressed), don't expect a mea culpa. If you have to work at being offended by something I say or do, I'm not responsible for your feelings.

Of course, maintaining a critical attitude rather than an indulgent one is generally not considered "nice," and people tend to assume that if I don't provide them with an apology or commiseration in a timely fashion, then it must be because I'm ignoring them, misunderstanding them, or disrespecting them. Which usually results in them explaining it to me again, and again, and again, with growing condescension until they resort to insults or passive aggressive platitudes 100% intended to make themselves feel like morally superior adults, rather than intended to actually change my mind about anything.

So, that sucks, because when it comes down to it, I'm still a 'people pleaser', and that approach pretty consistently leads to people saying I'm devoid of compassion, empathy, decency, humanity, etc. I can shut the windows and close the blinds, but I can still hear the eggs hitting the side of my house.

So, now I'm looking at the world our child is going to grow up in, and it looks pretty rough. I know they're going to have to deal with bullies of every type of sophistication. They're going to have to take some literal and figurative punches and get back up again. They're going to have to deal with toxic people and emotional malingerers (and malingerers by proxy) who want to make them feel like crap every time they open their mouth or put words on a page. 

I know I have to prepare them for all of that, but I also know that I need to raise them to be good and kind, and to recognize when they are wrong and amend their behavior accordingly. I have to raise them to have moral standards and the volition to adhere to them, but also to have a strong enough sense of self and enough respect for human autonomy that they can recognize when other people's problems are not their problems. 

But I also don't want to raise them as a super villain, because that never works out. 

Well, almost never.