When I woke up this morning, I thought: today I think I’ll join a Movement for fun. But not so fast, this morning me—it actually wasn’t so fun after all.
First, a little bit about who I am. I am a 7'4" “human” woman with hair made of pasta and bowling balls instead of breasts. I believe horses should be food and plants should be senators, and that anyone paying for cable is a jerk-off! I live in a house on Randall’s Island filled with rocks I’ve collected, labeled, and saved, and every day for work I take the 1 train end-to-end to learn how normal people look when they’re listening to music and dancing a little bit. I’m unique, but pretty easy-going.
But back to today. I felt interested in the Movement because I realized that I am, and many of my friends are also, people, and why shouldn’t we be given as much respect as anyone? (A novel thought for sure, but a worthy one.) So, I walked down to Union Square, where a protest for the Movement was set to be held. There were people of all shapes and colors there—women who were squares, who were shiny like silver car paint, even some men. But before I could join the others, I saw a sign in my way. It read: The Movement Platform.
Included in it were a lot of ideas like:
- People should brush their teeth every morning, if they can
- Pizza doesn’t fit snugly into any one food group
- Snow is sometimes good and sometimes bad, depending on where you are and what you’re doing that day
- If you’re doing a certain job, you should get paid as much as other people doing that same job
- Everyone should be allowed to be a senator—even moms
- Nuts are, in general, not delicious
(That’s just a small excerpt.)
I generally was okay with all of these, except for that one item about senators. That clearly conflicted with my view that only plants should be senators—so much so, that it felt like maybe they were calling me out for it specifically. I mean, why else would they say “everyone should be allowed to be a senator—even moms,” unless they knew that I, a skyscraper of a woman, was going to try to attend the rally and that I believed that only plants could adequately represent the will of the masses?
When it began to dawn on me that the Movement had singled me out and intentionally excluded me, based solely upon my preference of representation, I began to feel upset. So what if my beliefs actually excluded everyone that wasn’t a plant from Congress? It it is my belief, and I am a person, aren’t I?
As I was silently fuming into my travel paper bag, someone approached me. “Tripped up by that plant clause?” they asked snottily. “I was too, until I decided I didn’t care more about plants’ claim to power than I cared about the other parts of it.” This person was clearly a coward, who didn’t know what it was like to see yourself so thoroughly attacked in a Movement’s official document. Plus, there wasn’t anything in there about having a dangerously large rock collection, or gigantic sports balls for tits. I don’t think the Movement wanted me there at all.
I waited a few minutes to see if anyone would come to apologize for offending me, but no one did. So, I scanned the crowd to see if I could find anyone that seemed like my people. Here and there, I saw a bit of pasta hair, maybe a hard grey bulge in someone’s pocket indicative of a powerful rock-collecting addiction. But no one who looked just like me. So I left.