In case you are thinking, with alarm, There’s a common text abbreviation I don’t know, fear not. BION is an acronym, meaning Believe It Or Not, but it’s not commonly used in texting. I just tried it out to see what the world would be like if cliches meaningful to older people became commonly used text abbreviations, and the answer is Nothing, because that will Never Happen. I thought maybe HMU would qualify, but it migrated to text fame from rap, not from pager users, except the ones who were also rap stars. I guess. IDK. NVM.

So BION I am about to blog about a silly cultural moment, the slapping of Chris Rock by Will Smith. I don’t know what Will Smith could do to get me not to like him, but it must be way beyond slapping CR because I actually thought is was bold and sort of sweet of him to defend his wife so passionately, though Jada is hardly defenseless.

This came up at volunteering today and I found myself suddenly the lone person in the room defending WS, in the face of what I would describe as stolid Methodism. The group wasn’t hostile at all, just implacably convinced that No One should Ever slap anyone else for Any Reason.

This lack of imagination flummoxed me, because I think of them as at least intelligent, if not intellectuals, and I firmly connect those two concepts. People who can perceive the nuances of situations, ie, intelligent people, can do so because they can imagine different ways of being in the world. In this particular case, I can easily devise half a dozen possible reasons for the incident, all perhaps incorrect, yes, but also plausible.

Someone who is going for terms like Never and Inexcusable and Inexplicable to describe the case of a man slapping another man for insulting his wife is not only someone who completely lacks imagination. Worse, the person may lack the flexibility to rethink societal norms. You or I might not be the sort of person who would damage property to protest the ongoing slaughter of unarmed black people by police, or who would chain ourself to a tree to protect a forest and its planet, but I certainly hope that when we observe someone else doing these things, we have the wit to imagine why.

Ok, that was a big leap from the celebrity slap to ending racism and reversing climate change, but that’s where my mind went. The great thing about the human mind is that there is no limit to the size of the concepts that fit therein. Sitting comfortably on your sofa observing people doing whatever and thinking, No matter why these people are doing this, they are wrong is not just parochial and ungenerous; it’s a trivialization of your own enormous mind, filled with multitudes.