End Right Supremacy Now!

You want to stop prejudice and discrimination? Okay, let’s do it.

And let’s begin with the most oppressed of all the minorities, a group that includes 12 percent of the population and that has been made to bend to the will of the majority, from long before our country’s founding. It’s a minority that has been ignored, abused, mistreated, and shut out of important parts of society.

I am a member of that group, and I’ve stood by with increasing anguish, even bitterness, as other minorities are kowtowed to, granted special privileges, made beneficiaries of quotas, and more, while we’re ignored, subjected to disrespectful nicknames, and forced to endure life in a society literally designed to our disadvantage.

Over history we have been called “defective.” We have been punished for a condition which is not our fault. We have been accused of witchcraft and made to suffer the often-fatal penalties for it. We have been forced to denounce who we are. Most insidiously, we have been and continue to be invisible to society, our needs ignored.

Yes, it’s true: I am left-handed. Or, in the idiom of modern media, openly left-handed. I am not ashamed of it. I’m proud of my identity, even as society wishes to avoid consideration of my special wants and needs and the historical debt it has assumed through its mistreatment of me and those like me. Being left-handed was not my choice. I was born left-handed. I am as God made me.

I’ve paid a tremendous personal price for society’s willful disregard of my condition. Every day I endure physical pain resulting from an education system that forced me to sit at those one-sided school desks whose writing surface favors the right-handed majority, forcing me to twist my back into a painful, unnatural, and permanent posture. We were told that there were left-handed desks available. Yeah? Find one. And even if there had been such desks in the public schools I attended, I and others like me would have been singled out for derision. When told to stand next to our desks, we would have had to stand on the other side from everyone else. That humiliation is the sort of thing no child should be forced to endure.

Products that meet our special needs are rare, far more limited than their equivalents meant for the right-handed majority, and usually far more expensive. Sometimes, they’re met with revision and ridicule: “Yeah, like a ’s**thpaw’ could ever play first base!” This is the language of right-supremicists and must be condemned. But the nation’s voices are silent, and as we’ve been told by angry persons who can rhyme but not reason, silence is violence. And even people who think of themselves as people of good will are plenty ready to toss off a thoughtless comment or a dextrist slur. They are unconcerned by laughing at jokes that target Sinister-Americans. The very word “sinister,” meaning “left,” is a term of derision. Political evildoers and their allied idiots are described as being “leftist.” The communist-socialist movement, perhaps afraid to let their “ideas” be seen for what they are, have engaged in a blatant act of cultural appropriation by claiming to be one with us, calling themselves “the left.” They’re not. Joe “Bugout Burqa Boy” Biden, enslaver of millions of Afghan women (many of whom are left-handed to the extent that the government there, empowered by Burqa Joe, hasn’t chopped off their left hands), is right-handed. Nor has their movement lifted a finger (of either hand) to come to our aid. (Not that the “right” wing, which at least uses a term associated with being correct, is any better in their treatment of us.)

I personally know a nationally famous musician, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who is left-handed but plays guitar right-handed. Imagine the shame! The guitarist Jimi Hendrix faced the humiliation of being a member of our minority group by turning his guitar upside-down.

Yet this pressing issue is far out of the minds of our systemically dextrist public institutions. Don’t believe me? This year every member of Congress will be chosen. Is any candidate campaigning on a platform of anti-dextrism? Go to a rally and ask the person who wants to represent you what he or she plans to do to reduce discrimination based on handedness. I guarantee you’ll get a blank stare in response.

We are peaceful people (in part because most high-quality firearms are designed such that they eject the empties in our faces). You’ll not find us protesting in front of the homes of Supreme Court justices, demanding that the court phony up some way to extend special privileges to us or to grant us reprieve from the results of our own poor choices. You’ll not find us demanding federal funding for irreversible handedness-change treatments for little children who have been cajoled into saying that their handwriting sucks because they feel left-handed even though they were born right-handed.

The New York Times has not run long, inaccurate pieces about how our country was founded to promote right-supremacy. The Securities and Exchange Commission is not demanding that corporations provide Sinister-American representation on their governing boards. Critical Dextrism Theory is not taught in our schools, and there is no organization called “Sinister Lives Matter” created apparently to shake down companies so its leaders can purchase expensive homes for themselves, finance the destruction of cities, and promote communism.

Enough! We are entitled! We have been silent for too long.

Here is a modest and incomplete preliminary set of demands:

• We must be allowed to drive on whichever side of the road we choose, and right-majority drivers must honor our choice. To demand that we drive on the right is to deny our very identities.

• All doors and other entries must be hinged at the top, not either side, for neutrality of entrance and exit. Doorknobs must be placed in the center of doors. Because doors can be heavy, Congress must act quickly to repeal the law of gravity, unless it can be done by executive order. (Though I believe the official White House position is that gravity is the fault of the pandemic, Donald Trump, or both — certainly not science! A linguistic misunderstanding may have caused the administration to believe that the President is doing enough by being gravitas-free.)

• Left-handed people must be granted front-of-the-line access to anything that we might want that is in limited supply. This would include but not be limited to season tickets, this year’s hot new Christmas toy, and the handful of advertised big-screen televisions and game consoles at absurdly low prices in each store on “black Friday” (which might as well now be called “right Friday”). Stores, especially Kroger, must honor coupons presented by left-handed people even if they expired (the coupons or the people or both) years ago.

• Statues of right-handed people must be torn down, because those people cause us emotional pain even though they had absolutely nothing to do with us. Institutions named for right-handed people must be renamed, for the same reason.

• Colleges, universities, and other institutions must consider their histories of right-supremacism and take concrete action to reverse that history. This must include but not be limited to the creation of handedness-studies programs and offices of dexterous inclusion and recruitment favoring Sinister Americans in professorships, administration, and tenured positions, to say nothing of students themselves. Quotas may be necessary for a limited time, which in this case means forever. Sinister-American-owned construction companies must be given preference in contracting for aforementioned concrete.

• Special efforts must be made by all states to avoid suppression of the Sinister-American vote. This must include but not be limited to the adoption of non-smearing ink for ballots. The franchise must be extended to left-handed people even if they’ve been dead for decades or are characters in works of fiction (though “fiction” in this case may not include legislation proposed in Congress).

• All existing federal, state, and local civil rights legislation must be modified to include Sinister-Americans among the privileged and protected classes. And, what the hell, add us to the Americans with Disabilities Act, too, so that any handedness-specific product or service must be provided for left-handed people in the same quality and at the same price as the right-handed version. This must extend to books, which must offer versions that begin on either side. The words “front” and “back” in this context must be banned.

• Handedness-based discrimination in choosing players and the positions they play in academic and professional sports and athletics must be banned.

• Organizations and movements not specifically and exclusively devoted to Sinister-American issues must cease to use the word “left.” Our usage is because of our gift from God, while theirs is the result of poor upbringing and/or brain damage. They can find a different word. “Stupid” would be a good choice. This rule must apply, also, to signs and notifications in which it is used to state a direction. The Associated Press must modify its Stylebook to capitalize the words “Left” and “Sinister” and the phrase “Left-handed.”

• Twitter accounts and other public fora and publications must be searched for real or imagined evidence of right-supremacism, and persons deemed guilty by the jury of their social media peers must be made to offer humiliating apologies and promises to get re-educated. Assertions that a writer has left-handed friends will carry no weight, nor will actual left-handedness on the part of the writer.

• An industry of self-appointed “consultants” must be established to collect high fees from corporations for handedness-sensitivity “training.”

• No professional athletic team from New York may be allowed to win any championship, because that would be really funny.

• The order of the bases must be reversed every-other baseball game, but the roster must not be changed between games because of this. Designated hitters must be prohibited because they’re bad for baseball. Also the infield-fly rule and inter-league play. The World Series exists for a reason.

• Reparations must be paid in recognition of the historical wrongs resulting from right-supremacism. If the fact that some left-handed man or woman in 11th-century Europe got burned as a witch doesn’t entitle me to a lot of money I didn’t earn, paid by people not involved in the burning, I don’t know what does.

Even if you’re not left-handed, you can express your solidarity in a lot of ways. Why not, for example, make sure that your left-turn signal is on all the time when you’re driving? It’s a way to show you’re not a right-supremacist, and one that’s sure to attract attention. (Keep an eye open for right-supremacists who do this in an effort to fool you. They often disguise themselves as old people.)

Stand with us as we fight for Even-Handed Justice and declare our truth: Left is right, and Right is wrong.

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large at Open for Business. Powell was a reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio, where he has (mostly) recovered. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.