Month: September 2025

Oh my God!! I just learned I’m a Karen! And I have Southpark to thank for this enlightening although socially painful realization.

The bawdy animated comedy show’s clip features a white father in his study, calling in his adolescent daughter, closing the door, and asking her point blank: Why does everyone call me a Karen? Deadpan, the girl blinks and tells him don’t worry about it. But … he really wants to know. So the kid explains the expression came from the internet and refers to white privilege (meaning white people have nothing in life to complain about and get all the breaks) and specifically white women—who are educated, with career, car, McMansion, kids in good schools, coiffed hair, acrylic nails, health club, summer and winter vacations, stocked pantries, able to pay their bills and live a little—get real irate when someone (whose life will never come close to equating their own overly-blessed existence) ‘comes across as’ DISRESPECTING them, well, us.

Ohhhhh.

How many times have I gone on and on about a person or people being so disrespectful toward ME? I sound like my mother who also was put out when feeling disrespected by her children or a clerk or worker (of lower wages and no ability to ever afford college or to work her way up to better pay and better life and who also is a person of color).

OK. IDK.

I guess because a woman is white and the person she thinks is disrespectful toward her is a person of color or ethnic minority, and perhaps also learning English, that deep-seated bigotry is the cause of what just may be only a personality clash (although in appearance seems between the advantaged and the disadvantaged).

And what exactly are men (white, educated, good life) called who rant and rave about being disrespected? Rodney Daingerfield? The comedian went far in show biz with his famous line: I tell ya, I get no respect. And then came wild applause (because everyone knows exactly what he’s talking about). I guess we can keep calling men who bellow about being disrespected bastards. We always have.

Well, thank you “Southpark.” Now my goal in life is to never again go on about being disrespected by someone at the grocery store, gas station, government office, medical facility, other drivers on the road—whomever, wherever. Won’t hear a peep outta me.

Sigh.

Sigh.

(Fingernails galloping on the counter.)

It’s just that …. Nooooo, I said I’d never again talk about people being disrespectful toward me or ponder why I am not respected.

What color is your …

My problem with striving toward never being called a Karen again is that … well if you must know, respect is very important to me. I learned this about myself at age 29 during one of my unemployment stints. Besides applying for jobs all around—whether qualified, over qualified or not qualified at all—I thought career books might provide practical direction. But those kind of books amounted to psychoanalyzing yourself, to get to your core values. After taking a number of surveys (Karen that I am, I used to love taking surveys to find out more about ME), and matching weighted inquiries to precise questions, I discovered that the most important outcome I want from a job (or life) is not so much big salary but … respect: the feeling of ME being respected by my peers and everyone else. Wanna know the second most important value I want from the work I do (according to my young adult self)? It was helping people. See, I’m not all that bad for a Karen. Maybe the name should be Karena for those who sincerely care about and want to help solve the world’s problems.

I haven’t thought about those career guidance books since the ’90s. It just so happens that the career paths I chose have never been respected by the masses and now come with a lot of disdain: newspaper reporter and public school teacher.

So, it’s me, not them. I’m a glutton for punishment, I guess. Ooops, sounding too much a Karen again. I just assume Karens are self-pitying whinny white gals. Gosh, I hate myself already.

And being a Karen at my age is pretty pathetic. But I get it, kids. [That’s how to tell if you’re an old woman Karen, calling everybody younger than you ‘kids’ like I do all the time. To others it’s condescending.]  

So white women who are politically Left and Democrats, went to college (on government loans, grants and work-study like I had to), somehow always had a car (thanks Dad and others), never stopped applying for the jobs I wanted, sometimes getting interviews, rarely getting the job, lived in satisfactory housing (most in serious crime zones), managed to keep up appearances while overeating, traveling on occasion, donating to good causes, raising dogs as children—we are the Karens of America, Karena, if you don’t mind, for those whose hearts are in the right place.

Karens, from how I understood the insult pre “Southpark,” were white women who are educated and middle class or socioeconomically higher and Democrats but are overly afraid and anxious when some dubious incident comes along, involving a Black man, for example. The Karen I heard about was frightened over a Black guy while she was walking a dog or something. Some kinda strange encounter. She pressed charges. He turned out to be kind and decent and not criminally interested in her.

But hey, in speaking for all women, let me say our gender has a long history of being brutalized by men in general. It happens every single day. And we are raised to realize we can be attacked just for being women, and to always be on guard. To be suspicious first upon any encounter. The men in our Karen lives tell us to carry a handgun or some kind of protection. Because you never know when it comes to meeting up with a stranger.

I don’t know if every uptight white educated middle-upper class woman should be referred to as a Karen. The deep-seated racism, bigotry and prejudices and knee-jerk over reactions are what make a woman a Karen. Same for white men who overreact due to racism when dealing with a person of color, like the “Southpark” father must have been caught doing.

For my small part, I am just going to forget about other people’s disrespect real or imagined toward little old me. I learned a long time ago, a lot of people will never respect you no matter what you do and how you look. So you gotta respect yourself, be able to live with yourself, and to hell with what other people think about you (even if at first glance, you seem to fit the latest societal put down).

Been a long time since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities. Perhaps the macabre aftermath, captured in solemn black and white images, is lost to 21^st century Americans.

But the most devastating 20^th century explosion on Earth during war time—the deafening silence; the obliteration of cities, buildings, houses, schools, hospitals, parks, pets and plants; the instant evaporation of tens of thousands of human beings; the unnatural reconfigured invisible yet present air and water molecules linked to future cancer deaths in and around emasculated terrain on our shared planet; and the emotional annihilation of warmongering by the entire human race immediately after two lightning quick moments—is why, my dears, the U.S. did away with the confrontational title of a Department of War and consolidated all military branches into the U.S. Department of Defense—done so to try to comfort everybody the world over left to comprehend and ever so cautiously carry on in the dawn of the Nuclear Age.

See … we needed God, if at all possible, (if He even listens to us anymore) to forgive us our collective United States of America sin. And at that time, we never ever wanted to use a nuclear bomb again. And therefore we swallowed our sorrow and carried on as the World Leader to ensure no other nation on Earth would dare make the same mistake, repeat the same sin, bear the unbearable reality of living with ourselves for creating and causing the epitome of mass human death and destruction. Because … it was a sin (and is now our karma). Surely there were other ways to end a war.

There always had been … before the bomb.

Peace on earth

Sound too much like a peacenik, do I? President Trump, according to his admirers, claims to be one, too. Hates all war, we’re told by those who know him. Yet our history is as soon as WWII ended, we gallivanted all over the world to stop the spread of communism: Korea, Cuba, Indochina, Central and South America, Eastern Europe. We had to think of ourselves as the Good Guys, the God-fearing righteous people compared to our arch Cold War enemy the communists, thought to be godless subhumans devoid of souls. But it is the U.S. which remains the only nation to have dropped the bomb so far.

A quick online check of what was left after our atomic bombs exploded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would reveal the grotesque images seen by all who read magazines and newspapers in 1945: melted faces and other body parts, missing fingers, clothing tattooed into human flesh, survivors screaming in agony, the unimaginable yet real horror they alone … felt. And the radiation sickness that lasted months and longer. Perhaps the lucky ones were the 240,000 Japanese who after our bombs exploded their cities to smithereens were ‘evaporated,’ their bodies and lives instantly wiped off the face of the earth.

We alone were (and still are) responsible for launching that living nightmare.  

So ashamed were Americans at that time, a long 80 years ago.

But … all is fair in love and war.

And the World War in the Pacific needed to end. The story goes that a few countries including Germany were secretly working to create the first atomic bomb. The U.S. military had been testing tiny versions out in Nowhere, New Mexico, watched live by a number of GIs who in their later years would die from direct exposure to the aftermath of this precise and peculiar bomb.

Post war, we as Americans lived in our private twilight zones. Some became anti-war pacifists, society drop-outs, artists, Beatniks, teachers, do-gooders, Peace Corps volunteers, reefer smokers, heroin addicts. A few became devout atheists, even famous authors and newsmen. It must have been hard for some adults living in the early Nuclear Age to deal with the hypocrisy of our Christian nation killing so many people not just with the bombs’ explosion but for generations to come with diseases in any new life that tries to enter our planet at Ground Zero. Clearly the death toll by the atomic bombs was overkill.

Yet back home and most impressively, the great majority of Americans carried on: attending college and trade school on the GI Bill, marrying and creating the Baby Boom, owning homes quickly built for suburban life with parks, community swimming pools, backyard cookouts, Christmas gifts, and of course cars. It is a tribute, that era of post-war America, to all who sacrificed to fight in a world gone mad. Those who served our country deserved to live in peace and security for the rest of their lives.

However, with the passing of time, the great healer we are told, the horror inflicted by our atomic bombs in a country on the other side of the world became … incomprehensible. And in learning to not think about it ever again, we have forgotten what we were and still are today: capable of mass death and destruction and equally capable of never mentioning it again.