The more each of us aligns our identities with orthodoxy, the harder it is to separate ourselves from the talking points of ideology.

…that identity may be a kind of expertise but it is only an expertise in being oneself. The desire to tribe up and gain power through identifiers is a strong one but using your culture, skin color, gender, sex, or political leanings is absolutely no different than identifying as a cosplayer, a foodie, or a sports fan.

…that the notion that billionaires are more qualified than others to run the country is founded on the capitalist belief that CEOs are somehow better leaders due to their success in swindling others to amass an unnecessary and obscene fortune. Creating wealth is a fundamentally selfish pursuit; civil service is a selfless occupation. We shouldn’t mix the two.

Like a heavy feather, the plate glass gracefully sliced through air for 7.6 seconds before gently decapitating Flores where she stood.

I turned around. There were wakes of glistening human coolant running down this woman’s forehead. They were almost as long as her airbrushed and bedazzled fingernails. It was too hot for a weave that thick. She kept tapping at it, itchy from all that sweat spewing out from the top of her head. The nails, the hair — how does she function in this kind of heat? There’s no way she worked a desk job, or any job that requires her to type on a keyboard of any kind.

You do?

“I see this shit all the time working for the CTA,” the sweaty woman said. “He’s just some gutter punk.”

...that when the shit hits the fan, focusing on all the shit flying everywhere is the wrong choice. Deal with the fan.

The natural conclusion of the identity politic trend is to have each and every individual representing him and herself as a fully independent political organization.  After all, I am of the Angry White College-educated, Middle-aged, Heterosexual Males with Mothers less than Twenty Years Older than He named Don Hall political demographic, right?

...that Chicago Dog Sauce is both a terrible name for ketchup and the strangest ploy to get Chicago hot dog purists (which is like old lady Hummel figurine collectors and dudes who collect sports tattoos in the precious category) to use a condiment in history.  They could’ve called it “Ketchup for Morons” and it would’ve been more honest.

The list of labels can go on forever. How many labels before my identity topples over?

Identity is that which we find our own self worth. It is the moniker we decide is most representative of our essential I—being professionally successful, being highly educated, making a lot of money, being an excellent parent, being pious and faithful in a chosen religion, being socially and/or sexually popular and desired, being physically attractive or beautiful. It includes areas that we have no control over but decide to embrace—our skin color, our gender, our sexual preferences, our physicality.

Race and gender and physicality are born-in traits but the choice is not to erase them but to either embrace the stereotypes laid upon skin color, sexuality and disability or buck those stereotypes. Culture, hair style, language—the trappings of the outward display of identity—are all conscious choices.

What you choose indicates what you value in life.