As Rose Eveleth explains in a brief piece titled Two-Thirds of the World Still Hates Lefties: “Even the word left comes from ‘lyft’ which meant broken. The German words ‘linkisch’ also means awkward. The Russian word ‘levja’ is associated with being untrustworthy. Synonyms for left in Mandarin are things like weird, incorrect and wrong.” Meanwhile, “right” has mostly positive associations (e.g. “correct”). The history here is long, and not just linguistic — in the Middle Ages, witchcraft was sometimes associated with left-handedness as well.
The 13th of August is international left-handers day. I find the selection of that day to represent all the people who share my digital disfigurement to be strangely apropos. Thirteen is supposedly a bad number because the twelve disciples plus Jesus equals thirteen people at an event. There are many buildings that do not have a thirteenth floor. Friday the thirteenth is supposedly an unlucky day. Today is Lefthanders Day, an unlucky day on the most ominous day of the week. How fortuitous for those of us who celebrate this kind of oddity.
The thirteenth is my lucky day. I was born on the thirteenth. I got married on the thirteenth because the wife insists I remember things that fall on the thirteenth day of the month. She also scheduled the births of our children (C-sections are like that) for the thirteenth of the month. It isn’t her fault the children didn’t actually emerge on those days (birth is like that) So when Friday the thirteenth rolls around I enjoy the double-whammy of good luck; my favorite day of the week and my favorite day of the month combined into one great day to celebrate. Celebrate your weirdness. Instead of triskaidekaphobia embrace triskaidekaphilia in the presence of that sinister friend of yours:
While much of the world has at least accepted left-handedness in modern times, there were long periods in many countries in which left-handed children would have their tied hands behind backs in to “retrain” them. Intentions were good, in theory — kids were supposed to be prepared for a right-handed world, or so went the thinking. Paul Broca’s breakthroughs regarding the lateralization of the brain in the 1800s were a first step in recognizing the scientific reality of left-handedness, but research was slow to expand well into the 1900s.
Today, we take for granted that equipment should fit a wide range of body sizes rather than being standardized around the “average person.” From this understanding has come the science of ergonomics: the study of how to match people’s physical capacity to the needs of the job.
I can’t write with either hand, so it makes little difference to me that I am lefthanded. Still, there is no denying that scissors conspire against me, that pliers and other hand-specific tools attempt to maim me and all of the projects I embark upon. There is little surprise that power tools terrify me. The guards are always on the wrong side of the blade. The handles on the wrong side of the cutting surface. Left-handers are maimed at a much higher rate than right-handed people because the tools are not designed for them to be held in the left hand. The amazing part of all of this is that we manage to thrive in spite of the barriers put in our way. Celebrate being in your right minds. Southpaws unite!
International Left Handers Day is an international day observed annually on August 13 to celebrate the uniqueness and differences of the left handers. The day was first observed in 1976 by Dean R. Campbell, founder of the Lefthanders International, Inc.
International Left Hander’s Day was created to celebrate sinistrality and raise awareness of the advantages and disadvantages of being left-handed in a predominantly right-handed world. It celebrates left-handed people’s uniqueness and differences, a subset of humanity comprising seven to ten percent of the world’s population. The day also spread awareness on issues faced by left-handers e.g. the importance of the special needs for left-handed children, and the likelihood for left-handers to develop schizophrenia. There are approximately 708 million left-handed people in the world. Men are more likely to be left handed than women.
I don’t talk about this subject much. I don’t know too many of the southpaws who do. It is cross we bear, like the torture devices created by right-handed people for right handed people. Things like scissors and saws and clipboards. Equipment virtually designed to maim and handicap those people who dare to grab them with the other hand rather than the right one.
We don’t talk about it because there is little point in doing so. Most people don’t like to complain or to be known as complainers. But it bears mentioning, just this once, that someone says “Oh, you’re left-handed?” in a surprised voice every single time we pick up a writing implement or flip papers upside down on a clipboard. Someone asks that question of us repeatedly as if the fact of this isn’t apparent to us every time we try to use your specially crafted torture devices.
It is a right-handed world built for right-handed people. We left-handers just have to figure out how to live in it. Don’t blame us if we end up doing it better than you right-handers do. We are the only ones in our right minds. Science has demonstrated this fact.
I’m more ambidextrous than most people are. The blame for this can probably be pinned down to an accident in my Dad’s shop next to the gas station he inherited from his father. Because clean, damp rags are essential for cleaning windshields, and cleaning windshields was part of being a full-service filling station, the shop had a constantly running washing machine with an attached wringer right up front near the doors in the shop. The attendants would throw soiled rags into the washer and then wring one out fresh before servicing the next vehicle that showed up.
I had discovered that the wringer was an amazing machine for flattening and precisely creasing candy wrappers and other paper that I put in it. I knew I shouldn’t be playing around in the garage like that, but I couldn’t resist the fascination of the constantly-moving rollers and the way they sucked up everything fed into them. Couldn’t even resist as the rollers sucked up the fingers of my left hand and tried to wring out my arm in the process. Luckily or unluckily the thumb on my left hand caught against the guard on the wringer and kept the wringer from going farther up than the palm of my hand.
Because I knew I shouldn’t have been playing with the machine (and not wanting to sound hysterical) I calmly said “can someone help me?” none of the guys noticed me, so I said a little louder “can someone please come help me get out of this?” when they looked up and noticed me attached to the washing machine, I was suddenly the center of attention. “Why didn’t you yell?” they asked me several times. “You could have been seriously injured!”
…and I could have. The wringer, like all mechanical devices, was set up at a particular angle specifically to reduce strain and injury for right-handed people. Left-handers were more vulnerable almost by design, making the ability to leverage yourself out of the machine a near-impossibility if your dominant arm is trapped and the closest one to the wringing device.
I got lucky. I had to use my right hand for about six weeks, and the muscle that attaches my thumb to the palm of my hand still pains me periodically. I learned to write right-handed because of this accident, and because I could do that kind of work right-handed I was more inclined to take up right-handed mousing when I started using the computer. But no matter which hand I’m using at the moment, my handwriting still sucks ass. That is the dysgraphia, not the injury or my sinister nature.
Being ambidextrous makes me more prone to accident, from my perspective. I’m more tentative about how to approach any kind of manual work. Would this hand or that hand be better? I thoughtlessly grab with both hands and miss most of the time. It should be no wonder that power tools rank as one of the most frequent subjects of my nightmares.
So Southpaws unite! Time for a Sinister convention. Today is our day. That it happens to be my favorite day of my favorite month is just a happy coincidence.
When I posted this image to my Facebook wall, I hadn’t expected any real pushback. I mean, the facts of how dark skinned humans came to be slaves and lower class in America, and how they are still mostly poor in America, are incontrovertible. Nevertheless, my own family pushed back, people who should know better than to argue facts or history with me. They all know how much I read (or they should) and they all know that I have a tick that won’t allow me to simply ignore stupidity when I hear it.
…and still, the first comment I got was all lives matter, a stubborn refusal to see the world as it really is, a willfully ignorant insistence of falseness being truth that continued for the entire dialog under the image. The replies that I got were boilerplate. They were talking points that could be repeated (and have been repeated to me endlessly) by any FOX watching conservative; and so consequently this little exercise bears going through just this one time. Just to expose the talking points for what they are, so as to illustrate just how wrong they are.
All lives matter is a thought-ending phrase. It doesn’t actually mean anything in and of itself, which is why people repeat it after hearing that black people object to being targeted as they have been throughout US history.
(changed to a link rather than lamely trying to compile a list. -ed.)
The people who say all lives matter simply want the person they are speaking at to shut up. Here’s Felonious Monk from the Nightly Show (Larry Wilmore) explaining how this works:
(Stormtrumpers did get the Nightly Show canceled. You did manage to get one thing done in Trump’s first year. The Nightly Show videos have been moved on Comedy Central, yet again. They don’t provide embed codes for the segments in a way that is useable. You try clicking that banner at the end of the video in this link: ALL WORDS MATTER. Do you even see the banner? -ed.)
If I break my leg, I do not want the doctor telling me “all legs should be healed.” I want the doctor to fix my leg.
Language is our evolutionary prerogative. It is the air I breathe. I will not be shut down, belittled or pushed aside; and the people who, rightly, want to stop being targeted by police officers where they live simply because of the color of their skin will not be shut down either. Insisting there is no problem to be corrected makes you the target, and Stormtrumpers should remember what happened when they made everyone else the target of their anger in 2016. That payback is coming. You can be sure of this if of nothing else.
Here’s the first long comment from that attempt at a Facebook dialog I want to quote:
Democrats enslaved the black man Republicans freed them (Lincoln being the first Republican President). Democrats are now trying to enslave the country. As long as there are ignorant people in this country to vote democrat, there will always be slavery. On another note. 90% of the killing of the black man is the black man killing there own. Your president has caused more chaos in this country and ya’ll still voted that piece of shit back in and want people to believe that it’s the Republicans fault. When people learn to work for there own and not sit at home and feed off the working man they might have a different view of whats happening in this country.
Now, this comment comes from a relative, an in-law. One who knows that I am disabled. This is the kind of love and understanding that is common across Texas, not just in the men who are married to one of your sisters. They are certain that people who don’t want to work are just lazy, as if laziness were not a survival trait. As if they aren’t equally as lazy on any given day, willing to let their wives and family do the housework while they get fat on their recliners drinking beer and watching football. Writing is about the only work I’m capable of doing these days, and I can only do that sporadically between bouts of vertigo. The people like this relative who tell me to get a job are speaking in code. Unluckily for these hateful types, I understand their code because I was one of them once. Get a job is code for crawling away somewhere and dying out of sight. Out of sight is out of mind. They, to borrow a phrase, simply want me to starve to death and decrease the surplus population. They are Scrooges, manufacturing the chains they will wear for the rest of eternity, if you believe in that sort of thing.
Also note the logical disconnect in saying that Democrats, led by a black man, favor enslaving that same black man and everyone else in the U.S., a black man who we elevated to the office of the president. A president that he loving calls a piece of shit even though Barack Obama was demonstrably the best president of our lifetimes (more on this in a bit) This insistence that Democrats favor slavery is a non-sequitur, it doesn’t follow any logical reasoning, and yet nearly all conservatives and Republicans in general believe this kind of crap without even asking why they believe it. It is essential to their mental makeup that they project their own hatreds onto others, in a pretty typical psychological fashion.
White men enslaved the black man long before there was such a thing as the Democratic party. Slavery itself predates every record that has ever been kept by any society, and it was more frequently the next tribe over from yours who were enslaved rather than a group that was distinctly different looking. It was far more likely to be your neighbors than it was that your tribe had the chance to conquer peoples in a far away place and enslave them. Only expansive civilizations like the city-states of old could muster that kind of might. Rome took slaves from every part of the known world, most of them not being of any different color skin than their own. No, it took enterprising Europeans to hit upon enslaving a specific group of people who looked different than everyone around them, making those people easy to spot as slaves without having to think about the problem too hard.
Black slavery worked well in the early American colonies and across most of Europe because black people could be seen as slaves at a glance. The otherness of appearance made it easy to keep those people in their lessor place of status. You didn’t have to keep records of whether or not this or that black person was a slave (although they did anyway) because if you looked different, you were property and not a person. This disconnect, this racism, continues to the present day in the structures and beliefs of the people in the formerly slave holding states, and in the major cities all across the U.S. Most people simply don’t make the connection that darkness, even darkness of skin, is routinely chalked up to something malign.
Have you never noticed the prevalent fear of the dark? I’ve had many people insist that this is not the same as racism, but it is based on exactly the same mental structures. Just like sinister means left-handed as well as being threatening, darkness implies threat or differentness, and this is across all peoples everywhere. And it manifests in people looking down on those around them whose skin is darker than theirs is. It manifests in trying to force left-handed people to become right-handed, or killing the left-handed outright for their threatening nature. Killing those who look or act different because they scare you. Xenophobia, as someone with more education would refer to it. Xenophobia is rampant in the world today.
Slavery runs rampant in the Bible and was widespread throughout the world prior to the enlightenment, and it was those enlightened liberal thinkers that ushered in the end of slavery as well as many other laudable achievements of the time (things like the germ theory of medicine) and conservatives of the time (today’s Republicans) fought tooth and nail against the notion that slavery was bad. Because conservatives favor tradition, and slavery was a cherished institution.
So slavery predates the modern Republican hatred for Democrats. The Democrats in the 1800’s were pro-slavery, that much is true. Democrats were a predominantly conservative party at that time; conservative being the generic label for people who favor the status quo, people who don’t want to change.
The party that opposed the Democrats in 1852 was referred to as the Whigs. The Whig party disintegrated in 1854 over the question of slavery in the form of the Kansas-Nebraska act. I’m sure you all remember that from your Kansas history. No? Well, that’s okay. The Kansas-Nebraska act made it possible for states to decide if they wanted to be slave or free states at their time of admission, making the broad expansion of slavery across the American continent a thing to be feared by abolitionists everywhere. The Whigs really didn’t have a purpose for existing in the first place other than to be opposed to the policies of Andrew Jackson, and he’d been dead for quite awhile at that point. The Democratic party as it existed then had been formed by Andrew Jackson and his supporters. The party of slavery is a fitting label to hang on his legacy of murder and genocide.
Progressives of the time were abolitionist and they joined forces with Northerners who didn’t want the South to be able to bring their slaves into non-slaveholding states. This further injury to the sensibilities of abolitionists was the net result of the Dred Scott decision; this Supreme Court decision made it possible for slave-owning Southerners to live wherever they liked and keep their slaves in whatever state they lived in whether that state was a free state or a slave state. If the repeal of the Missouri compromise wasn’t enough to solidify an anti-slavery movement, then having to compete with slaves for work in your own free state was a thought far too loathsome to contemplate.
The formerly progressive Whigs and the progressives from the other political factions in 1856 joined together to create what became known as the Republican party. This is important, so take note of this fact. Republicans were the progressives and liberals of the time. Republicans were progressives and liberals when they were formed in 1856. They were the people who favored change, and they nominated Abraham Lincoln in 1860, a presidential candidate who successfully stood astride the two warring factions (pro-slavery/anti-slavery) and managed to pull a victory out of the contested election of 1860 by promising to leave historically slave states alone and promising to preserve the union. Northern conservatives, people who wanted to preserve their non-black, non-slaveholding states, also sided with the progressives in handing the Republicans and Lincoln this victory.
Progressives freed the slaves. Not conservatives. Conservatives were pro-slavery in 1860. The progressive Republican party elected Abraham Lincoln. Just as progressive Republicans lead by Teddy Roosevelt broke up the monopolies and cleaned up the corporate mess that the country was mired in back in 1900.
Parties are not static creatures. They live and breath and change. The Democrats eventually changed, although it took time for the conservative/liberal polls to shift. The Democrats aligned themselves, one might even suggest anchored themselves, in the unquestionable white supremacy of the Andrew Jackson years. They stuck with white supremacy through the Civil War and reconstruction. Stuck with it through Jim Crow. They clung to their white majorities and their white working-class voter base through World War I and looked the other way during the red summer. But they weren’t the only ones who looked the other way. There was mass denial of the racism of that year, across the political landscape.
The Democrats held their white majorities through the Depression and World War II. It helped that Republicans had been bought by that time. Bought by the corporations that they had fought in the 1900’s. So the anti-monopolists were tamed. Republicans looked the other way as the poor starved through the depression, or shrugged their shoulders and pretended there was nothing to be done. So the progressives started to shift from the Republican party. They started to put their allegiance with the Democrats and their support of unions. Unions that just happened to be in alignment with the concerns of the white, working-class voter that dominated the landscape of the time. Aligned themselves with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his hair-brained scheme to short-circuit the malfunctioning international gold standard and end the Great Depression.
After LBJ’s betrayal of White Southerners by pushing through the Civil Rights Act, the majority of white voters in the South migrated to the Republican party, a party that they had hated until explicitly invited to join the party by Richard Nixon. At the same time minorities made a political shift and started supporting their historic enemies, the Democrats. It was at this point that the parties functionally changed political orientations, the Republicans harkening back to the past, becoming predominantly conservative, and the Democrats became liberal. These trends remain in place today.
Look around any Republican gathering, Trump’s never-ending Hitler-esque political rallies for example, and notice that the audience is predominantly white. Now look at Democratic gatherings, a the offices recently filled with women and people of color, and you should notice a pretty stark contrast. This is what Reince Priebus tried to warn Republicans about when he chaired the Republican National Committee. That future he warned ya’ll about? That future is now.
The last point to refute in the long (previously quoted) comment is this one:
90% of the killing of the black man is the black man killing there own.
Murder is always predominantly committed by people who look like the victim, not just black murder. This is because murder is generally committed by people the victim knows, and those people will generally be people who look like them. Their own family members are quite frequently the perpetrators, for the exact same reason. Look it up. White on white crime far exceeds any other created racial grouping. So this pointing out of black on black crime as being indicative of something sinister? That is just more racism being exposed by someone who can’t seem to figure out he’s a racist.
Here’s the next comment that I want to refute:
The black man sold the black man to the white man. You can not deny that there are more poor people now then before obama became the dictator of this country. You can not deny the democrats crashed the housing market. You can not deny that what is really wrong is only wrong for Republicans not democrats. You can not deny that hilary clinton killed 4 good men in Bengozie. You can deny obama has devided this country. You can not deny obama has spent 10 trillion dollars while saying Bush spent 4 and should never have done that. Liberals (democrats) are moochers and free loaders, you can not deny that. I know plenty of democrats that are in denial because they are secretly ashamed of them selves because they are so used to the way they are they can’t change. A person can look at history and see what ever makes them selves feel good but that doesn’t mean they are right. If there were no Republicans to work and support liberals (democrats)? How would liberals (democrats) live then.
Assuming that my antagonist was serious and not attempting to be humorous. That’s a large assumption, I know. But, assuming he’s serious, I’ll take these points one at a time:
The black man sold the black man to the white man.
White men sell white men to black men. Probably yesterday, even. Slavery still goes on, especially sex slavery. Ask your president about sex slavery. He met a few sex slaves while hanging out with his buddy Jeffrey Epstein. You’ll be finding out the truth of this in the near future. In any case, the simple fact that people sell people proves about as much as selling your time to someone else for money proves. Everyone is a mercenary, some of us are just better paid than others. Knowing that selling people crosses a line that will get you killed for your trouble, that alters the calculation from “how much can I get for selling my child” to “how much does that third job pay?” the latter being the preferable moral decision we are looking for as a society.
You can not deny that there are more poor people now then before obama became the dictator of this country.
Obama wasn’t a dictator. He wasn’t even an aggressive president like W. or Bill or Bush the first or Reagan. He was definitely better than Tricky Dick, who was probably the most aggressive person to hold the Office of President in my lifetime before Trump cheated his way into office. Trump wants to be a dictator, just like his heroes are dictators. Trump puts all other presidents to shame being single-handedly the worst president ever to hold office on the first day that he was in office, and has gotten worse every day since that day. I find it hard to imagine how he could be worse, until the next time I wake up and read the news and think well, that’s how he could be worse. Tomorrow will be no different than it was today.
As I said previously, Barack Obama was demonstrably the best president of our lifetimes. The only reason to propose that he was not is that his skin is black or because he was a Democrat. Being a black Democrat makes hatred for him a double feature. Not only were his policies the policies of Republicans watered down, just like Bill Clinton’s were, but he had the unmitigated gall not to march to the military drumbeat that every president since Reagan has adopted.
But poverty? Poverty has gotten markedly worse under every president since Ronald Reagan. Obama was no exception to this fact, largely because he didn’t change the trickle-down bullshit that Reagan forced through congress in the 80’s. The economic bullshit that has been adopted by every president after Reagan just like the focus on the military was adopted by every president after Reagan. Trickle-down economics was rightly termed voodoo economics by Bush the first, but he was just as willing to practice that voodoo if it got him elected. When he dared raise taxes to balance the budget, he was forced out of office by the wealthy elites who wanted to punish him for raising their taxes to pay for services that they didn’t solely benefit from.
Poverty has gotten worse under Trump, just as it did under Obama. (40% of Americans are poor) His rewards to the wealthy have stoked a fire that will shortly have the economy overheating and tanking (yield curve inversion) and who knows what the effects of his writing his own personal loopholes into the tax code will be. Everyone should be channelling every dime they have through a series of shell companies now, just like President Trump does (He’s smart. Just ask him) That’s how you get to keep all of your money and then sue people because they didn’t give you more money.
The poor are still the economic slaves of the wealthy. That inequity has yet to be addressed. That is what the current liberal/progressive movement wishes to fix, one goal among many.
I’m not going to make this long, long article longer still longer by belaboring the last few misconceptions that were voiced in that quote. The image and the article were and are about the Black Lives Matter movement, and slavery. I’ll just run through a few more refutation links for clarity’s sake (and I might need them later myself)
There have always been conservatives and liberals, even though they didn’t always use the same names. There have always been adherents to tradition and people unafraid of experimentation, people ready to adopt new rules to cover new realities. Conservatives are the former, liberals are the latter.
Since the vast majority of young people are liberal by definition (they themselves representing change to the status quo, the status quo being their parents) and since the vast majority of young people are not lazy shirkers, his broad dismissal of liberals as worthless lacks even the basic merit that I try to give every argument offered. He’s condemning his own children and their children with one fell sweep of his opinion. They will probably discard him when he becomes a burden in old age, just as easily as they will discard his dismissal when they hear it now.
Rampant militarism is the hallmark of a dictator. The kind of person Trump loves and wants to be. So Obama? Not a dictator. The black lives matter movement is not a threat to you unless you are a White Supremacist/White Nationalist. That’s it, in a nutshell. Don’t believe me?
Every. Single. Point. Every point that was offered has now been shown to be wrong. All of them. If I wasn’t related to the commeter that I was quoting from by marriage, I wouldn’t have bothered to write this novelette. I substantiate my arguments with checkable facts and links to articles that reinforce my arguments. Facts which are irrefutable. Follow those links and understand the arguments, then if you, dear reader, still disagree with me feel free to offer a verifiable argument of your own.
This one sat on the edit pile since I copied the comments to the blog in expectation of writing this now completed article. That was back in the summer of 2016 as the Facebook link to the original meme posting on my Facebook wall should illustrate. I went ahead and advanced this article in time to it’s publish date (January 31, 2020 why 4:04?) so that it will at least briefly appear on the front page of the blog. I agonized over outing my in-laws for their blatant racism for all the years in-between 2016 and now. Now, with the Trump impeachment soon to be history and Trump (probably) crowing about victory on Tuesday at the SOTU, I wanted this article out. If there is a civil war, this is it. Here. Now. At the polls in November. We will fight and we will win, or we will die trying.
Contrary to former RL friend’s comments, the contrapositive of this yard sign are not false unless you want to craft them as false statements. That is, all the contrapositives other than the line about kindness, which cannot be everything. Kindness is only kindness, but it goes a long way.
Every year, more than 2,500 left-handed people are killed around the world from using equipment that is meant for right-handed people. The right-handed power saw is the most deadly item.
Statistically, one person in 4,400,000 is killed every year from using equipment which is meant for right-handed people, and this accounts for more than 2,500 deaths of left-handed people every year. In terms of numbers, 10.3% of left-handed people (both males and females) suffer an injury while driving a vehicle, and 31.6% of left-handed people (both males and females) get injured in sports.
International Left Handers Day is an international day observed annually on August 13 to celebrate the uniqueness and differences of the left handers. The day was first observed in 1976 by Dean R. Campbell, founder of the Lefthanders International, Inc.
International Left Hander’s Day was created to celebrate sinistrality and raise awareness of the advantages and disadvantages of being left-handed in a predominantly right-handed world. It celebrates left-handed people’s uniqueness and differences, a subset of humanity comprising seven to ten percent of the world’s population. The day also spread awareness on issues faced by left-handers e.g. the importance of the special needs for left-handed children, and the likelihood for left-handers to develop schizophrenia. There are approximately 708 million left-handed people in the world. Men are more likely to be left handed than women.
As another of the sinister (left-handed) nature, I can vouch for the existence of the stigma against the left-handed. My primary school teachers wanted to make me right-handed as well. My mother refused to let them convert me. There is a real risk to being left-handed in a right-handed world. Southpaws have a higher rate of accidents since most systems are designed for righties. I sympathize with the child and wish him luck.
On every issue there are people who want to move in a particular direction, and generally it is true that there is a majority that is happy with the way things are.
Back when we first started writing down ideas, codifying the world as we saw it, the world was ruled by divine right. Kings, Czars and Emperors abounded, all of them claiming to have their power because god granted it to them. But the people at the bottom of the chain of power suffered horribly and died for want of even basic care; food, water and shelter could be and were denied to them by the more powerful amongst them.
Many excuses were made for why this was so, but in the end the people in the middle of the chain came to believe that the suffering of the bottom could be alleviated by sharing the wealth present at the top. To this end, they began to cause trouble. They started providing care for the less-well-off (the dreaded poor these days) educating the lower classes about the wealth available to the upper classes because of the combined efforts of the group as a whole.
When enough of them understood their plight, and the artificial nature of it, they began to form together as groups, pressing their rulers to provide to them some of the benefits that the rulers enjoyed. Through the ages, forums and then parliaments were formed, attempting to gather to themselves some of the power held by the rulers. As this form became more common and more powerful, it just so happened that the supporters of the king (the conservatives) happened to be sitting on the right side of the room, whereas the people demanding change, more power (the liberalizing influence) were sitting on the left side of the room.
So it was probably not by chance that the supporters of the king were seated on the right side of the aisle, the correct side, by their understanding. After all, supporting god and king was the way to be in those days. History has progressed and kings are almost extinct. Where they still exist in the civilized world they retain a figurehead status with no real authority beyond the title they hold. Where they exist in the rest of the world, they are no better or worse than other people, tending toward dictatorship in the more perverse examples of royalty, and seen as the benevolent father in the more enlightened examples.
However, the verbiage of Left and Right remain; the Left being those who wish to change the status quo, and the Right being the group which favors the way things are or, even better, were.
Except that memory is flawed. The way things were never was, or only was because of elements or structures which no longer exist. The way things were relied upon variables which ceased to be, and so the way things were cannot be re-established.
There are other words for those who want things to stay the same. When they refuse to change because they fear change, the word is coward. When they refuse to change because they cannot see that the change has already occurred it is called delusional. It is only when the change will make things demonstrably worse is the descriptive word prudence, or caution. It is only then that the second definition of right (to be correct) applies here.
The changes which are forcing themselves upon us through technology and an imperfect understanding of the closed system which is our habitation known as the Earth are inevitable. We cannot deny their occurrence because reality will assert itself until it kills us all if we do not admit that change has occurred. The changes which we can afford but are being resisted (universal healthcare as one glaring example) will occur either now, or at greater cost in the future.
So today, now, the Right are not right they are simply right, as in seated in the section reserved for those who are in love with the past in an demonstrably unhealthy fashion. Creepy.
Postscript
I was informed by several rightists that this article is not funny. For the record, self-identified conservatives (those on the right side of the room. Those who are conserving the tradition of royalty in 18th century France) are either cowards, delusional, or both simultaneously. Most of them don’t know this because they are also crushingly stupid. A rare few of the conservative leadership are simply prudent. Most of them only identify as conservative because it is/was fashionable not to be seen as being liberal.
I am conservative on some issues. Decidedly conservative when it comes to tattoos and piercings. Definitely conservative when it comes to preserving the biosphere of planet earth. But I don’t define myself by those stands. On most subjects, especially economics, I am a liberal. Please put me on the left side.
There are forty-four definitions of the word right in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as of this date (March 4, 2020) which one of those definitions is the one you identify with? If your answer is correct or one of the variant definitions that are synonymous with correct, you should substantiate this correctness with third-party verification, at least to yourself. If you are puzzled by the word synonymous, then you are a member of the conservative majority that I’m referring to above.
