“Hi there. Foot traffic in the store is crazy. Another C!@#$ restriction coming Friday.”

-Text from a Maryland Grocer

…

“It’s Fox Chapel [Pennsylvania] that is removing the word [squaw]. And there is a CNN article about how it’s a nationwide movement to remove the word.”

-Text from my Niece

…

“I cancelled Thanksgiving. We’re having a [Shamdemic] spike. But I think everything is going to be good because they will have a vaϲϲine soon.”

-Mom on the phone

The word in question entered the English Language from an Algonkian Amerindian word in 1625. That word meant exactly the same thing as senorita does in Spanish. It is a First Nation term for young woman.

When will it be necessary to remove the future gender slur “woman” from the English language?

I will be publishing an article on the word squaw under the Plantation America tag. My interest in the removal of words dovetails with a curiosity concerning the media caused stampede at supermarkets and the cancelation of America’s single most beloved holiday.

No cultural artifice, no form of communication links us more than the word, either spoken or written. Our very rules of life, our social contracts, our so-called “rights,” even our prescribed dooms if convicted of disobeying the masters are codified in words.

We have been indoctrinated into a strong belief in our own freedom and that no unseen minds, no conspiracies, no Creep State, no secret societies, no government agencies, no one—and especially no cooperating minds—wields control over us. Every public building—private and government—has numerous signs commanding certain very specific, and sometimes irrational, behaviors. Yet we persist in a fanatical belief in our freedom when we are not even permitted to directly breathe air.

If you are an American, this is literally the first commandment of your civic faith. I am not here to speak against your faith—it is sacred to you and I should not impugn you, your priests or your gods.

As a writing exercise, a science-fiction synopsis if you will, I would like to suggest two fictional possibilities:

-1. Imagine if there was a world in which the idiot collective, cartoonishly known as The People, sometimes The Demos, sometimes The Body Politic, were first and foremost a consumptive mass. Yes, that is ridiculous. You likely either believe that you are a child of God or that you are an aspect of collectively ascendant mankind, the living God of the atheists, our most fanatically religious folk. But imagine if there was a world so evil, that its rulers simply named you a consumer? Imagine if you were just a consumer, just an eater? That would make you, in the mind of the masters, a resource, like the wind, the sun—imagine eight billion tiny suns crying into life, blinking dully in the media shepherded night and then sighing into oblivion. Their handlers would then simply set up a regulatory system to harvest the energy expressed by these billions of feeble minds. Such minds would broadcast more harvested energy if these minds were used to generate emotion. Fear, terror, anxiety, depression, anger, fright, agitation and hysteria would be the power source of this soul-eating machine. Thought, especially rational, informed thought would be its anathema. The process of thought and the presentation of information would only have as its purpose, the generation of emotion. The word in its audio and visual form would comprise the keys on the control panel for this massive energy source.

-2. Imagine such a hellish soul factory beginning to malfunction and generate discord. Control of the word would be key to tightening control. Reduction of the number of words in use would be a priority. Changing the meaning and tabooing words in order to generate emotional frenzy, hysteria and submission would become a necessity.

There was a reason why the subjects of Christendom from Augustine to Luther, a span of a thousand years and more, were not permitted direct access to the Word of God and had to listen to mass in a foreign language. The masters of our forefathers knew well the power of words and that those words must be controlled by the cloistered masters to keep their slaves in the dark.

Most of us have looked back in some way, through fairy tales, TV, comics, movies, history books or documentaries and laughed at or pitied those poor medieval dupes, cowering in the candle-lit shadows of their Demon-Haunted World.

And here we are, in as deep a dark, not even permitted to share a meal with family members, gather in a public space or utter certain words, shivering here in the gas-lit shadows of our Science-Haunted World.