I'm Offended!

The Charlie Hebdo attack sure backfired, didn't it?
Before last week, few people bought the magazine in France and fewer outside the country (including me) had even heard of it. The jihadis who murdered ten of Charlie's staff and two others (including a Muslim police officer) were heard to shout as they fled, "We have avenged the prophet Muhammed. We have killed Charlie Hebdo."

Uh, not so much.

In fact, Charlie Hebdo was on life support for mere minutes when French media outlets pledged to lend their staff to keep it going. The first issue since the murders had an initial print run of three million copies: that's since been raised to five million, and the issue has been bid up as high as C$300 on ebay. This for a magazine whose usual sales were around thirty to forty thousand a week. Unless Muhammed was on the cover...then the sales might be goosed as high as 100,000. Hey, you draw what sells, right?

Meanwhile, 'Je Suis Charlie" took hold in the virtual world, including in this blog and on my Facebook page for a full week (the longest I've kept a political statement as my profile picture since I joined Facebook).

Oh, wow, goody for me. Goody for all of us.

How many of us, pre-Charlie, really believed in freedom of speech and expression?  Believed in it enough to risk our lives on it? How many of do now?
Not many, I'd wager, "Je Suis Charlie" notwithstanding. Certainly not me. Though I'm trying.

I have written about free speech before,  twice in fact, and my views on it have vacillated wildly over the years. But if I'm honest with myself, I come to a point where I'm mentally yanking on a rope that will bring a limit to free speech within reach. 

I actually offend far too easily. It's something I have had to guard and gird against over years, because the world is so highly offensive to people like me. It offends me when violence is committed upon an human being, an animal, or even, often, an inanimate object. Pain offends me. Loneliness offends me. So does injustice. Poverty, be it material or especially emotional--offends me to my core.

That other stuff? Racist caricatures,  filthy jokes, and all the rest of it? I admit it: often I laugh. Not always, but often. I've developed a very keen sense over the years of when the joke isn't really a joke. I'm not talking satire, I'm talking actual malice. Be bullied for years and you'll get this sense too.

And when it's not a joke...when you would expect me to become angry....it's rare that I do. At most I will get this disgusted expression on my face, like I have just stepped in shit, barefoot, and I'll walk away, seething internally.

I have a dear friend who will stand up for anything he believes in and anyone who is being picked on in his vicinity, and he'll do it regardless of who he has to confront. I admire this man more than most men alive and wish to hell I had the balls to emulate him. But that's another thing being bullied for years will do: instil a strong sense of cowardice that you learn to call "prudence".  I'm exhilarated every time I hear another story about the bully Craig faced down (you're damned right I'm going to name you, Craig, you're far too modest about this stuff)...exhilarated and scared. I worry that one of these days he might bite off more than he can chew.

In the meantime, though: being offended is a choice. You can say something offensive directed right at me and only me and unless you're somebody I care about you'll be roundly ignored. Consider the source, and all that. I have had so many awful things had to me in the distant past that barring the odd old echo, I've been thoroughly inoculated. You're better off getting to me, at this point, through someone I love--and be warned if you do that, I don't fight fair.

Insult an entire class of people to whom I belong? Whatever. Seriously. Whatever. I'm confident enough in whatever group I choose to affiliate myself with that your insults mean diddly-doo.

We live in a world that seems to run on offence. It's almost as if people have claimed the right to be offended. I first noticed it with movies: people around me, most notably my parents, seemed to be offended by certain words or images (especially images of naked flesh such as I saw every day in the bathroom), while next to nobody seemed to care about images of gratuitous violence and gore in those same movies.

Along came the Internet, and the avenues to possible offence multiplied beyond all imagining. Now there are whole flocks of people who spend their days in a state of high piss-off, trolling from site to site to site, offending and being offended in turn. It's self-perpetuating, nauseating, and...dare I say offensive?

I always say to people who are lashing out at me, "I'm sorry somebody hurt you so badly that you feel the need to hurt me." It stops people dead in their tracks more often than not. I've become convinced over time that it forces people to recognize a fellow human being. So rare that people do that, I find.

At any rate, being offended is  not a choice one should make lightly. To my way of thinking, we should be much more offended at the state of the world than we are about somebody's scribblings. But that might be just me.