I
want to take a moment to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the
historic “March of the Dumb.”
It was 1928. People who couldn’t speak were getting fed up with always being referred to as
dumb by those who could speak. So they got organized.
They
held a convention. The first order of
business for the delegates was to adopt an official, universal method of
non-verbally expressing their outrage over being called dumb. And this, my
friends, is how giving the finger was born.
Then
they decided to have a big march. So thousands of them gathered in Washington
and descended upon the Capitol, carrying signs that said stuff like I’M NOT
DUMB and IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE. This was probably the best political march
and rally of all time because no one had to sit through a bunch of boring
speeches. Instead, when they reached their destination, all the marchers turned
toward the Capitol and, in unison, they gave the finger. I really wish I would
have been there. Can you imagine how politically empowering that must have
felt?
But
the organizers of the march soon became discouraged. Everybody still kept
calling them dumb. The media dubbed their march The March of the Dumb. Of
course, in hindsight, it’s easy to see that it was unrealistic to expect any
single action to bring about such a major cultural change. In every civilized, orderly human society, there has to be some group of people that
the majority considers to be dumb. So an uprising of the dumb was seen as the
beginning of the slippery slope into anarchy.
So
the organizers devised yet another innovative political tactic. They formed the
first “Mothers Against” group. They figured that if you call your organization Mothers
Against whatever, you can morally intimidate your opponent into submission
because nobody wants to be seen as against mothers against. It doesn’t matter
what the mothers are against. So they formed Mothers Against Calling People Who
Can’t Speak Dumb aka MACPWCSD.
But
everybody still kept calling them dumb. Nobody took MACPWCSD seriously. Again,
when viewed through the lens of history, we can clearly see that the flaw was
not in the idea but in the execution. We now know that for a political acronym to
have traction it has to spell an actual word or at least be rhythmic like
NAACP. Otherwise all you have is a bunch of Roman numerals. It can’t just be
Mothers Against any old thing. It has to be Mothers Against something that spells
something, like against pornography or nitroglycerin or yodeling or serial killers.
And it has to be a word with a positive or at least neutral connotation. You’ll
never get much sympathy with, say, Mothers Against Ovens.
At
any rate, this story has a happy ending. We don’t call people who can’t
verbalize dumb anymore. And society at large owes the leaders of this
liberation movement a huge debt of gratitude. Because remember, they invented
giving the finger.