Fast Casual Social Justice

I want to be featured on Upworthy.
I want to be the man who breaks the mold.

I want to stand in front of a crowd for my nine-minute spot,
tell you guys all about my hardships,
any quirky moments I experienced with my family,
the objectification of sexism,
the search for identity other than what people expect from my assigned body,
and anything that'll get me featured with a clickbait title.

I want my works to make people go,
"This Man Experienced Institutionalized Discrimination,"
or "This Man Broke Out of the Mold and You Won't Believe What He Did Next,"
or, hell, "Check Out What This Man Had to Say About President Obama."
Most of all, I just want the fame,
the money,
and the women. Women dig that feel-good bullshit.

No, I don't want to challenge the norm:
I want to make people feel too good about themselves,
to think, "Well, it's not so bad being a middle-class college student
because at least I don't have to experience sexism,
racism,
homophobia,
transphobia,
whatever-motherfucking-phobia these bastards have come up with,
I'll just share this link with my friends,
and make the cycle of feel-good feels complete itself,"
and then go back to whatever they were doing,
like telling their wives not to wear that dress because they might be taken advantage of,
or making a wisecrack about how Matthew Shepard was a white-collar tweeker,
or, hell, laughing when Brian Griffin finds out he had sex with a trans-woman on the new Family Guy.

But you know what?
Let people be hypocrites.
Let people kill people.
Because what I say is this:
"We're all gonna die anyway."
To be fair, I probably stole that view from George Carlin,
and it's not like he was crying over how horrid the world was becoming
in the hyper-religious, hyper-capitalistic, hyper-repressed 1980s,
where people got up in arms over silly sounding words like a specific group of seven he recited back in, I dunno, 1971
it's not like he became the agent provocateur because of his sadness
no, he was this mad all the time
and he's being unironic
definitely not doing this as a joke
oh god I'm dropping the anvil so hard right now

Back to what I was saying:
I want to be featured on Upworthy,
because I am fucking vain.

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