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| Young, shown here staring down Punishment Martinez, has some ugly opinions Photo Credit: ROHWrestling.com |
But wrestling companies did the smart thing and started to become "woke," or at least pretended to be such, and outreach to all different demographics started in earnest. I can't say it really was in good faith at least until extremely recently, but one could say it's better late than never. Others, who correctly say that cops and corporations should not be welcome at Pride, say it's not enough, but it's also still better than what WWE was doing as late as, say, 2004. Of course, the most infinitesimally small change to the better will be seen as a massive overreach by idiots stuck in 1840. Take for example Silas Young, a midcarder in a floundering company known as Ring of Honor. Young's gimmick is that he's the "Last Real Man," which is an incredibly on-point heel gimmick for the modern day, when masculinity's definition is constantly being redefined and where gender has been discovered to be a spectrum. Many people say that the best gimmicks are extensions of one's self, and unfortunately with Young, that is the case.
The sad thing is that this is perhaps the most cowardly way of putting his feelings because he never says that offending gay, Black, Jewish, or other demographic minorities is part of what makes society flaccid and "PC." They're all code words though. People love ripping on fat, vegan, gluten-free, or nerdy folks, although that last one might be either a) outdated thanks to nerd culture dominating movies and television or b) accurate because nerds are among the worst bigots out there. But I digress. The fact that he wants to go back ten years so he could offend more people than what feels socially acceptable, when ten years ago people were making the same complaints about not being able to offend people like they could ten years prior, when 20 years ago, people were complaining about not being able to offend like ten years prior and so on just shows that he just wants to let some inner ugliness out. Even now, the pushback against fatphobia or making fun of people for dietary reasons is starting to grow. I can't imagine what people like Young will be like in ten more years.
It's not just confined to the world of wrestling. The National Basketball Association recently decided it wasn't going to use the term "owners" anymore because the idea of one dude or a corporation "owning" a team of mostly Black men just doesn't have the best optics. They're opting to use the term "governors," and folks, the crusty old White dudes aren't having it, especially Jim Ross:
Ross hasn't shied away from critiquing the "snowflakes" online, calling anyone who calls him on his shit a "keyboard warrior." It is telling, however, that Ross is the first to complain about PC culture making everyone soft, but here he is whining about a simple name change for the most privileged group of idiots in sport. Team governors are among the most hubristic and ignorant people in the world, and they get deified by the press and a working class that seems to think a billionaire owner is less of an anathema than a millionaire player. I mean, take for example in the NBA Finals when one of the co-governors of the Warriors shoved Kyle Lowry. He got a year ban from going to games, but had it been the inverse, and Lowry went into this guy's office and shoved him, the police would've shot Lowry dead when they got to the scene.
What people like Ross and Young don't understand — or they do understand and either don't know it makes them villains or they embrace it — is that social justice is a good thing. Putting people on an equal plane with each other and treating everyone justly and fairly should be a goal that everyone strives for, but the people who have power and money don't want to give it up. They're nothing more than the whining children who don't want to share their myriad toys with siblings or friends who don't have anything. If you were a parent, you'd scold the former, right? Then why do people continue to give the powerful the benefit of the doubt? It's maddening.
The worst thing is that people involved in wrestling who want to make it a conservative haven have no idea what the sport/art they participate in is about. Pro wrestling, by its very nature, is where anything can happen. They don't know the history of their industry, and they don't know how even at its most closed in how much power it has given the people they want to shut up by enforcing their anti-PC bullshit. The thing is one might expect it from Ross, who is a baby boomer. The boomers are perhaps the most entitled generation, the last generation to have it better than the one before it, and the ones who fucked society almost irreparably for everyone who followed. Of course they're going to be irritable.
What's Young's excuse? Dude was born in 1979, which puts him squarely at the borderline of Generation X and the millennials. You'd think that he'd get it a little bit, especially since he works for a floundering wrestling company. Maybe he blames those damn millennials like The Elite for leaving and leaving him with less of a payday. I don't know. Either way, it's incredibly wrong that Young or Ross or anyone who pines for the good old days when they could slur minorities with no repercussions to think that today's society is soft. Despite the fact that people want PC culture to dominate, the marginalized are still hella marginalized. Black people are poor at a disproportionate rate from White people. Trans people have far higher suicide rates than cis people. Only two percent of rapes that get reported, itself a small subset of total rapes, end up in convictions for the perpetrator. If you think those people have it easy today, then you're more ignorant than I thought. It's why being a social justice warrior is beyond any shadow of a doubt a good thing.
