New Theme!

This week's theme will cover: Trigger warnings, safe spaces, PC, woke, cancel culture and other things that a certain type of conservative twists to mean something bad and a certain flavor of liberals use to beat other liberals up with.  

I wrote about safe spaces and trigger warnings a few years ago. Mostly that old blog is still my opinion now. I think you need to be able to defend your ideas and know why you hold them, so banning all speech that is not what you believe is a bad idea. I know at the time the push was from liberal colleges banning conservative speakers who were pushing pretty awful ideas. The thing is that banning them from speaking didn't stop those ideas from spreading, it just fed into their victim narrative. It ended up giving them another platform from which to spread their bad ideas. "They are so worried about what we have to say that they won't even allow you to hear it!" Ooh...that sounds like something fun to hear!

I thought at the time it was a bad idea. Debate them. Show why it's a bad idea. Sharpen your own ideas and reasoning. But banning speech is almost always a bad idea. Yes, I do have areas where I abandon this stance, the whole yelling fire in a crowded building line. There are things that if you choose to say them, you should face consequences for that. Calls to violence, inciting a riot. But for the most part I think that free speech is too important to hamper. Though it's government interference that we are speaking of when we talk about the right to free speech. Governmental consequences, banning speech and books by government control is where problems lie. Personal consequences are different. You are never free from consequences of your speech. 

But right now we are seeing the right pulling in the force of the government to curtail speech. You are seeing schools being stopped from teaching about racism. You are seeing teachers told not to talk about LGBTQIA+ issues. Or if a student tells them they are in the rainbow they have to tell parents. You are seeing Governor DeSantis waging a tax war with Disney for objecting to the "Don't Say Gay" bill. Even though the Supreme Court decided years ago that corporations were people and had freedom of speech as well. These are clear violations of the Constitution. But as we now have a court who makes decisions based of the law of "because I can" there is little hope that anything will be done about it.

I am going to revisit a lot of those original thoughts separately this week. Updating what I think now on some of it, touching on how it's all been weaponized as well. But today I'm going to talk specifically about trigger warnings. 

I mentioned in that blog a few years ago that I appreciate when friends warn me that a movie has vomiting or hand injuries because I have a really hard time with those. They make me nauseated. For different reasons, but still, ick. But a lot of entertainment and think pieces come with a whole list of trigger warnings now. Does it deal with rape? Does it deal with suicide or suicide ideation? Is there questionable language? Is there smoking? The list of trigger warnings is long. And people will for sure jump in your shit if you don't include them. 

I do not include them in my writing.

At least not in my fiction. 

I sort of feel like maybe I should put a general trigger warning on the description of my blog, or on my Facebook page for my blog. "Trigger warning: I won't give you one."

Because trigger warnings ruin the story. The way I write my fiction pieces I don't want you to know right away what I'm writing about. For instance if yesterday I had opened the story with a trigger warning about suicide the whole story would have hit differently right from the start. I wanted that to be a reveal. The fact that her grandmother had killed herself and then why. I want you to come on a journey with me, I don't want to spoil my own story. 

You know how I feel about spoilers. Very triggering...

It's hard to write the way I do if I'm worried about posting trigger warnings. Or worried about triggering people in general. I write a lot about death. I feel like once you've been reading me for awhile none of that is shocking, but at the same time I have had people reach out to me asking why I didn't warn them. Well, because I didn't want you to know.

And I do know that that means for some people my work can be really disturbing. And I'm sorry about that. But only a little. I am sorry that they felt discomfort and were upset. But I'm not sorry that my work can sometimes be disturbing. I think, for the most part, I'm actually a pretty optimistic writer. Even if it's a story where the main character ends up having been dead for 30 years and just didn't realize it. Or if the story is about getting ready to sell the house that your grandmother died in. I am not for everyone. Hell, I'm not for most people, but that's just it, I'm. I am. This is my writing. My place. 

My space. 

And it's not always safe. 

And it never comes with a trigger warning. 

And I'm not likely to change that.