We Will Not Be Erased

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

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Abby Zimet, staff writer

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Last week's lunatic, Orwellian announcement that the Orange Cheeto's minions have barred the Center for Disease Control and Prevention from using seven words in official documents - “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based,” which, duh, is what saves our lives - isn't going over so well in a country that, by ornery tradition, doesn't ban words. Even as shamed officials hastened to add they're not so much banning the words as earnestly suggesting they not be used, 

Their ignorant cause wasn't helped when they offered the doublespeak alternative, "C.D.C. bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes," which is no science at all - especially in a twisted Trumpian world where a foul billionaires' boondoggle becomes a "tax cut" for the little people.

Thus do we now have an insurrection against those mindlessly emulating Orwell's barbed proclamation in "1984," "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words." Not, say furious critics who keep saying the unsayable.

 On Twitter, many have tossed the banned words back like so many poison darts - "There once was a #fetus named Don Whose birth was a #science-based spawn #Entitlement knew him #Diversity threw him And #evidence-based voters yelled “be gone!” - warned that in a dictatorship, "they erase words before they erase people," and asked, "Are we still allowed to say "fuck you?" This week saw the launch of the CDC Poetry Project, inviting poems containing the outlawed words to "give voice to the forbidden." 

And Tuesday night, the Human Rights Campaign partnered with artist Robin Bell to gleefully project those treacherous words on the belly of the beast - the front of Trump's D.C. hotel. The message also included the declaration, "We will not be erased." 

It was conveyed by the LGBT community, but really, it came from us all.