"Perhaps its familiarity," Randolph suggested plaintively, "rendered it temporarily invisible to you."
* * * * * * * * * *
There's this thing we do as humans. It's a thing we don't notice which is ironic because that thing is not noticing things (is that ironic? Or is that simply fitting?). If we don't notice something out of familiarity, it's because we've learned to take that thing for granted. It's always been there. It's always been done this way. It's tradition. But we also don't notice things, sometimes the exact same things, for other reasons. Like maybe it's—oh, I don't know. Let's take the name of this airship as an example—an Inconvenience.
What could possibly, in our American society, be one of these things, be our picnic basket, that's perhaps so familiar that we've all become blind to it? And yet if somebody points out how they've stumbled on it, we deny its existence because it's too inconvenient to think about and haven't stumbled on it ourselves. Let it remain invisible, please. Although rendering something invisible does not mean, as we have seen in Blundell's case, that it will never cause you to stumble. It will. Eventually. I mean, it's still right there where we've all known its been all this time. Sure, rendered invisible because it's just become part of our lives after all these years. But at some point, it must be acknowledged and dealt with or it's just going to sit there getting crashed into by a bunch of people who really wish that maybe all those people not crashing into it might finally see it and help do something about it.
I'd say maybe more of us than not have finally crashed into it. It probably took too long for some of us to notice that picnic basket but once you have, you have two options: help move it or deny reality and keep pretending it's not there even though it has finally been rendered visible. You'd think once somebody stumbled on the picnic basket full of crockery which has been lying there in the same place all this time, invisible to everybody because, well, that's where it's always been and we've always got along just fine with it right there, haven't we? . . . once somebody stumbled on it, they would want to deal with it. "Hey, let's maybe move it out of the way, shall we? Now that we've noticed it's a problem." You might think that. But you might also be surprised at how many people decide on the second option and simply keep pretending that they don't see the picnic basket at all. And those people, when you insist that the picnic basket is there and it's really causing a lot of people to stumble on it, insist that it isn't there at all because they've never stumbled on it. Not once. Ever.
Maybe living in ignorance of the picnic basket could once be seen as a non-malicious option. It wasn't! But enough people seemed to think, "Hey, man. Leave it be. Don't rock the airship, man! Some people are really insistent that the picnic basket belongs there and arguing with them is just causing division, right? And anyway, the picnic basket isn't causing as much stumbling as it used to! We've really come a long way in avoiding the picnic basket!" But at this point in our journey aboard the Inconvenience, the picnic basket can no longer be ignored. Or downplayed. Or left out just sitting there tripping up a very specific section of our crew.
We have got to move that fucking picnic basket (sorry for the profanity but I think it was about time). Maybe by any means necessary. We certainly need to stop worrying about the people who claim they can't see the picnic basket. Denying reality isn't the other side of the argument. It's just avoiding the argument and shifting the focus from the picnic basket (which is really causing a lot of banged shins) to the incivility of the people yelling and demanding that something that doesn't exist needs to be changed. They seem to think the problem isn't one of invisibility or stumbling or picnic baskets; they seem to think the problem is people trying to make inconveniently familiar things visible.
Seriously. We have to move the fucking picnic basket. And while we're at it, can we defund Lindsay Noseworth?
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