Retard. What's a retard? Well, thank you for asking. A retard is a mentally disabled person. I don't know why that word gets abused so often.

Rahm Emanuel used the R word for his own purposes and I'm sure there are people here that would say the exact same thing he did. Sarah Palin took about ten seconds to voice her claim against the word, declaring that, as a mother of a child with a mental disability, the word was offensive and shouldn't ever be used. Rush Limbaugh came out to say that the word was perfectly acceptable, stating that there's no reason not to call "a bunch of people retards retards." Palin calls it a satirical use of the word and essentially laughs it off. Then this happened:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/stephen-colbert-sarah-palin-is-a-fking-retard/

My point starts at 2:48, though it never hurts to reinforce your "Sarah Palin sucks" brain sector with the first 2:48 as well. Stephen Colbert has a way of doing such things. Of course this was 2010, but it's still relevant.

But retardation is a mental state… it's a mental disorder. Of course it is only recently that people have come to understand such things (same can be said for that other R word, rape, though we're still evolving, I completely understand), but it's really hard to see that there are those few left out there that don't. Take Ann Coulter for example:

http://specialolympicsblog.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/an-open-letter-to-ann-coulter/

Special Olympics, quite obviously a one-sided advocate on the issue (and I don't say that as a bad thing), came at Coulter for using the R word on television, and as Stephens says here, the only reason she used it is because she can. While I think Stephens is right, I also think he's a little bit off, though.

To bury a word is to eradicate it. To eradicate it is to keep it from being spoken. To keep it from being spoken makes it - gasp - BAD! That's why I couldn't go say "fuck your sister" to someone. People tell me not to say "fuck" because it's bad. But the dictionary says it's an act of sexual intercourse. So I'm not telling you to do something bad, I'm just telling you to go fuck your sister. I'm from Indiana, there's nothing wrong with inbreeding. We don't call it incest here.

Point being that Ann Coulter unintentionally made people like me start to think about how our typical reaction to such blatant misuse of a word is to overdo it to the point that the word either gets buried or gets changed. The same thing happened with "gay" and "queer" at some point. Hell, the same thing happened with the N word. I hear it all the time, but it's never a white guy saying it.

I saw a clip of Morgan Freeman discussing why Black History Month should be entirely abolished. According to the video, he says that pointing out Black History Month as a month dedicated to black history takes away from the melting pot that the USA supposedly is. It separates… better yet, it segregates… black history from the rest of it. Why can't we just have 12 history months? And, like so many things, Freeman gets that point across to me.

So, enough examples… why do we try and bury things so that they shrink and frizzle a bit and then pull them back out to reclaim the power again? Why can't we just understand that a word has certain points where it gets abused and just not abuse it? I mean really, is it that hard? I volunteer with Special Olympics all the time and I help retarded people do things that retarded people do. That's what they are. It's only offensive if you want it to be…

Have fun.