There’s no need to sugar-coat odious speech
A few years ago, I was on a road trip in Spain — a country that, until recently, wasn’t exactly simpatico with dietary restrictions.
Knowing it was a longshot, I asked the older lady working at a cafe if she had soy milk for my coffee. Confused, she asked why I couldn’t have regular milk, and I said it made me sick.
She then delivered a brutal, old-school assessment: “If you’re so sensitive that you can’t have milk, maybe you shouldn’t leave the house.”
I can’t help my dairy intolerance, but I saw a basic — and absolutely hilarious — wisdom in her verbal throat punch.
Us Americans have softened so much — building coddled, curated worlds free from allergens, real or imagined. Our echo chambers are designed to avoid uncomfortable ideas or words that make us squirm if they aren’t suited for cocktail party chatter. This worldview is carefully maintained by our institutions, corporate overlords and, yes, professional sports leagues.
I thought of that old Spanish sage Sunday when UFC honcho Dana White dressed down two reporters looking to him to denounce fighter Sean Strickland. The latter had unleashed a now-viral press conference rant ahead of UFC 297 on Saturday, with a rather ineloquent soliloquy that hit third-rail topics like homosexuality and gender identity.
A reporter asked White, if he ever thinks to tell his fighters to tone down their trash talk.
“We’re in the fight business,” White said. “If you get your feelings hurt that bad, you probably shouldn’t ask the type of questions when you know the answer you’re going to get from Strickland.”
In other words, we’re all adults here. If you can’t stomach the milk, that’s your problem, pal.
The press was baiting White in an attempt to make him a finger-wagging school principal. Expecting him to admonish UFC fighters — people paid to take blows to the old cabeza —for not embodying the values and delicate rhetoric of a rich white progressive lady living on the Upper West Side.
Instead, White doubled down on Strickland’s right to be himself, flaws and all.
“I don’t f-cking tell any other human being what to say, what to think. And there’s no leashes on any of them … ,” White siad. “Free speech, brother. People can say whatever they want and they can believe whatever they want.”
