Friday, February 8, 2008

I don’t have shit to do on Friday’s now, so once again I have managed to spend an entire 24 hours inside of my apartment. Having a weekday off is sort of a double edged sword. If I really want to I can get a lot of things done while everyone else is at work, but more often than not I spend an entire day confronting my laziness.

That isn’t the point of this post though. I just finished watching a news story on ’48 Hours’ or ’20/20′ or ‘The View’ or ‘Nightly News with Bryant Gumble’ or whatever the name of the fucking ‘tard ass news show that reported the story of a 6’4″ man getting a 2’10” woman pregnant was. Besides how completely revolting it was to imagine the sight of a 6 foot 4 inch man piling into a 3 foot toad without wearing a condom, the news report made me notice just how completely stupid it is that society must stop using the word “midget”. When did the word midget become so fucking horrible that we had to change the term to an extremely wide ranging and vague term as “little people”? Children are little people, the elderly can sometimes be little people, people that are shorter than the person who is addressing them can all be called “little people” by the taller person, Danny Devito is a little person, the list of individuals that can be called little people is far too wide to try to use it on a specific group of people.

There is an extremely obvious difference between a 4 year old kid that’s 3 feet tall, and a 30 year old that’s the same height. Granted that both of them are little people, but one of them is so completely different that there really does need to be a proper term for them. I mean, telling your friends that you accidentally pissed on the head of a “little person” because you didn’t see him standing in front of the urinal really isn’t specific enough. Your friends would think you just pissed on a little kid or pretty much anyone shorter than yourself and that would make you look like a pervert or some kind of a weirdo. “Little person” is too vague to explain something so completely freaky as dwarfism.(I had a long and funny explanation of what would put a person into the category of midget at the beginning of this paragraph, but after reading it again I realized that it was way too fucking mean for me to openly post it. That’s a first.)

Why is the word “midget” so bad anyway? We’ve had to stop calling “African Americans” black, we stopped calling “Native Americans” Indians, we can’t categorize all “Hispanics” and “Latinos” as Mexicans anymore, and now we have to replace a term so perfectly specific as “Midget” with the wide open term “Little People”. Now if you tell me that your dance teacher is an African American, then naturally I assume that your teacher is of darker complexion because they are of African descent. If you tell me your gardner is Hispanic, then I can instantly create a mental picture of your gardner’s skin tone and what kind of car they drive. If you tell me that you had your nails done by an Asian lady, then I immediately know the racial profile of your nail technician because of her continental lineage. However, if you tell me that you bought cotton candy from a “little person” at the circus then my mind is left completely wide open as to what the person looked like. You cannot label an entire group of very different people with a vague height description.

If you’re not going to use the word midget then come up with a new fucking word. Just because you’ve been genetically banned from riding on roller coasters does not give you the right to have a monopoly on a term with such wide meaning as “little people”. If you don’t like the word midget then come up with a new word that you do like. Maybe call yourself “nuggets” or “trolls” or something that will at least give people a good idea of what you look like. You can even call yourselves something really awesome, like “knee hize” or “micromen” or “tiny extremez” or some neato word us normal people haven’t even heard before. That would be pretty bad ass. I wish I could come up with some really cool term that would give people a good idea of my appearance just by saying it. Instead I just have to tell people that I’m white. I really don’t see what these “little people” are bitching about.