"A Modest Proposal ..." Available as Ebook
April 14, 2016
Reason has left the building. Doesn't it seem that way lately for the topic of gender? This is "the sky is blue", "water is wet", and "the birds and the bees" territory. This isn't religion (which is about the unseen and therefore open to opinion). This is reality. And the reality is that reason, truly, has left the building.
In 1729, Jonathan Swift, wanting to speak against England's poor treatment of the Irish, turned to satire and "A Modest Proposal" was born. What started as a small pamphlet became a part of history and a time-honored tradition of pointing out the ridiculous and wrong-headed through satire. Following Swift's example, last month I wrote my own modest proposal, "A Modest Proposal for the Replacement of Our Outdated Gender Binary Classification System with One More Suited for Our Progressive Age", and I've since decided to further follow in Swift's footsteps by distributing it as the 21st-century version of a pamphlet—an eBook. It's now available on Amazon and elsewhere. I've made it free where I'm allowed to, and you can also simply download it from my website as a PDF.
Why write this? Why read this? Day after day, celebrities, politicians, and CEOs are demanding that we pretend that 2+2=5. How are we supposed to respond to that? We have no billion-dollar corporation behind us. We have no political power to wield in our defense (and those who do have it have too-often proven cowards when faced against a tsunami of insanity). So what are we supposed to do? What else can we do but laugh?
