No Place For The Weak

Different things motivate me to write. Sometimes it's desperation. Sometimes it's something interesting. Other times it's something that makes me angry. It's perhaps no surprise that I'm partly of French extraction because the more trivial the thing is, the angrier it has the potential to make me. Today is one of those day's where it's something of moderate seriousness at most, and so I'm fairly angry. I read this thing where someone earnestly proclaimed that theirs was a "family blog". Hide the sharp objects from me.

First of all, I think it's worth questioning the assumption that anything designated for the family must be sanitized and made inoffensive. I don't know what families the people who say this stuff come into contact with, but the families that I've been around in life are not thrown by some cursing and references to sex and violence. The flip side of that is that not every single person clamors for the vulgar and explicit. The selection of the family unit as the distinction is, in short, terribly fallible.

Discarding that for the sake of argument, I wonder what the real value is in catering to the family so exclusively. There's a smugness in it that I can't abide. One is made to feel lesser than for having a gutter mouth but no dependents. Is this the payback for excluding family men and women from excursions of debauchery? Must there be a mirror exclusion from institutions such as newspapers and sports teams? Must there be a war between the attached and the independent?

If there must, then I shall relish it, and my sole reason shall be to exterminate the odious employment of the word family in that way. I hope to preserve the family unit in the process, so as to not throw out the baby with the bath water, but if it is lost then it will be no worse than a wash. They just should never have thrown that term around so cavalierly. There are consequences in this life, and while 'family-size' food items have shielded them to this point, there's a limit.