Respect

March 11, 2021 at 10:45 am

It seems the orig­i­nal author, Autistic Abby, has turned their Tumblr pri­vate, but the Internet has ways of copying/stealing/pre­serv­ing/disseminating infor­ma­tion. I’m going to add to that effort because I think this block of text is powerful.

Sometimes peo­ple use “respect” to mean “treat­ing some­one like a per­son” and some­times they use “respect” to mean “treat­ing some­one like an authority”

and some­times peo­ple who are used to being treat­ed like an author­i­ty say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an author­i­ty I won’t treat you like a person”

and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

Autistic Abby on Tumblr

It’s an impor­tant reminder of the nuance of lan­guage. It’s also a wake-up call for treat­ing peo­ple with decen­cy regard­less of any power dynam­ic. Hopefully, human­i­ty will con­tin­ue to evolve to be more col­lec­tive than indi­vid­u­al­is­tic. Make a deci­sion today that ben­e­fits every sin­gle human being on this plan­et. I know that’s hard to do, but it’s what we should be doing.