Watermelon man

Words fail me.  Apparently a firefighter went to a meet and greet.  Apparently people were supposed to bring something to eat (known in Baptist circles as a pot-luck dinner).  Apparently he brought watermelon.  Apparently he was fired for bringing the watermelon.

It took me a minute to process why he was fired. Then it dawned on me.  Ah, I understand.  It was racially insensitive.

Now, did he mean it that way, as some racial slur?  He says no, but he was fired nonetheless.

And that got me to thinking, as I am wont to do.  I have no idea if he meant it as a racial joke or not.  But the very fact that I'm sitting here trying to imagine if a man was really sending subliminal racist messages with a fruit shows the power of living in a perpetual witch hunt.

Remember Inherit the Wind and The Crucible?  Both of those were written, not to accurately tell the stories of the events they referenced, but to judge the era in which they were written. That era was the height of the Cold War and McCarthyism.  Both were, in their own ways, meant at digs against those who rush to judgement, whip people into frenzies, attack and condemn through guilt until proven innocent - basically everything they saw in that era of the Red Scare.

I know that growing up in the 1970s, this was still a very big part of American history.  From movies and TV, to news specials and documentaries, to history lessons and being assigned to read those two literary works, the message was clear.  To be one of those types who spin records backwards to hear hidden meanings, or who freeze each frame of a movie to find some hidden Communist message, or rush to judgement to condemn and later accuse, was to be a witch hunter, a McCarthyite, a gestapo agent, and so on.

And yet, look at today.  This whole 'coded language' and 'trigger word' movement is nothing other than spinning those records backwards.  You can be punished simply because you used a word that has of late been deemed a secret code for something completely other than what you thought.  You can be condemned because you spoke or acted or dressed or walked in a way that someone, somewhere had declared to be offensive.  There is no trial by jury here.  You are guilty as accused, sentence to immediately follow.

Again, just that I spent time thinking 'Gee, maybe the watermelon meant something, maybe it was a hidden message, maybe he was innocent' all about bringing a fruit to a pot luck meet and greet shows the subtle and slick way we can be pulled into a witch hunt culture.  And none are worse than when you're pulled in by the very ones who warned so loudly about the terrors of living in a witch hunt culture in the first place.