What Shall We Name It...?*
*Part of the lyrics of a Venezuelan children's playground song-game.
Labeling is frown upon these days. People do not liked to be labeled or boxed. However, we get all kinds of people every day; people who highlight their differences so much that they even expect that the language as we know it be altered so that they can fit the new categories they create for themselves.
I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with labeling. Imagine to get into a super market and find tons of products arranged in unlabeled packages. However, as humans, we have historically claimed a certain level of superiority in relation to the rest of the things that are part of our world. We claim a certain complexity that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to impose labels upon ourselves.
That being said, we also insist that there are good people and bad people (even if good people sometimes do bad things and bad people, once in a while, not entirely disinterestedly, do good things). My father was a very radical guy. He had only two labels: people and shit-piles.
For him, people always did their best to do good, even if doing good meant breaking the law. Without having met Martin Luther King, he also thought that if a law was unjust, then it was your moral responsibility to break it and do what was right for others, for the community. Justice, respect for others, and contribution to society were things that, in his opinion, characterized decent people.
Shit piles, on the other hand, were prone to do the wrong thing most of the time. They would break any social norm for their own benefit, even if they were being observed.
Shit piles were usually irresponsible, unreliable, and lacked any moral ground to relate to universally held principles of social coexistence. They only cared about their own good and they had no scruples harming others even if by doing so they did not guarantee their own wellbeing.
Shit piles were predictable, he used to say. You can bet what, how, when, and to whom they’d do things. You could guess what their position would be on any given subject, just based on how they might benefit from such position. They came out of their houses every day with the sole purpose of proving that the world had two kinds of people: vivos and pendejos (alive/smart and weaklings/fools). Shit piles had to secure their position on the vivos team; social Darwinism at its worst.
They are the ones who park in the wrong place, but complain if someone else blocks them. They dirty the streets, but they would kill whoever dares dirty their property. They abuse children, women, or elders in the street, but god forbid someone messes up with their children, their women or their elders. They are the ones who refuse to honor a debt, but would savagely collect whatever is owed to them.
Shit piles have evolved. They have developed clever ways to disguise most of their nature. Some of them are hard to label on the spot, but if carefully observed, the label emerges at the slightest action, like a brand on their foreheads, blurring their fancy clothes or their expensive cars: SP.
Thanks for your reading
This was my entry to @mariannewest and @latino.romano’s 5 Minute Freewrite: Thursday Prompt: LABELING. You can see the details here.
Make sure you visit the Freewrite House!!!
Matarile-rilerón, eso lo escuché en Los Simpsons
Really! I have to watch that episode 🤭