Goodbye, Slur!

Date: 9/29/2020

(cw ableist slurs) I was at some kind of expo or something, everyone was gathered into a little arena type situation, chatting before a presentation began. I started to hear people use the word "retarded" as a "joke" or whatev (which I seem to somehow still hear irl too, as an adult human). Randomly I spoke up, and for some reason everybody listened. I said "what if we just didn't say 'retarded' anymore? What if we just said goodbye to the whole concept of spouting that word?" People kind of looked around in a "yikes" type fashion as if I had just no sense of humor. One person explained matter of factly that as long as you use it to describe a thing rather than a person then it's ok. I didn't really know how everyone was feeling about this topic, but I just said "is it really even worth it tho? We could just not..." The celebrity speaker came onto the microphone and asked for clarification about what we were talking about. Everyone tried to answer at once and it was completely incoherent, so I jogged over to him and said in his ear "is it really worth it to say 'retarded' anymore?" He indicated he understood. Next thing I remember, thousands of people were gathered in the streets around the expo center, waiting, for what I'm not sure. We were hanging out for a while, and suddenly a huge blue monkey hot air balloon floated out of the expo center. We knew it represented the word "retarded" being released and floating away from us forever, not sure if it was written on the balloon or what lol. After a minute, some of us started a round of applause to say good riddance. Overall that effort toward the sentiment was pretty half hearted. It never became an uproarious applause like people in large groups like to do. I guess lots of people really didn't see a problem with the word, or wanted to keep using it like that.