We Need a “National Swear Jar” (26 Sep 17)

Over this past weekend, I started to post what a great thing the start of football season is. I remember going to my first high school, college and professional football games as a child — all within Scouting “circles”.  It was a great experience, watching the players run into each other or running the ball from one end of the field to the other. More importantly, for two or so hours, it was as if all of America was there participating alongside the teams. 

Then politics had to get into the way of the game. It made the games now harder to enjoy, for the “drama” of the game shifted from the plays on the field to the names of the various teams playing. Or to whether that guy with darker skin than most of the people watching can actually perform as the leader of the team – the quarterback. Or we should keep our teams playing and performing in the United States instead of allowing them to play for European or Asian audiences. More recently, whether or not people will use the minutes before the game starts to make a “statement” of some sort which had very little to do with the actual playing or refereeing of the game.

Everyone cusses. I don’t know anyone who have not either inwardly thought or actually verbalize phrases like “damn, that hurts”, or “kiss my ass” or “go straight to Hell — and don’t stop for the water along the way…” when they are confronted with a situation which is hurtful to them or a friend of theirs — socially, emotionally, and/or especially physically. It was a time whereby if I had wrote THOSE words on paper, or spoke them out, there would be a line of Moms all angling to take me to a kitchen, bathroom or outdoor sink, running the water and applying that God-awful Irish Spring(tm) or other bad-tasting soap to my mouth and then allowing me to rinse and spit it all out with the water. They would be saying something loudly (as if I was deaf as well as mannerless) to the effect of “your MOMMA didn’t raise you that way!” while they would attempt to “purify” my mouth of those “bad words”.

Today, those words are common expressions on radio, television, our newspapers and online. More potent words — words which people would whisper to one-another or which were stated in serious anger as prefaces to “fighting” in many cases and “dying” in other cases — those words are out there whereby sensible people can not only hear them, but turn around to THEIR children and say “well, if he said “p***y”, I guess it’s good enough for you to say it too…”

I must be ancient. That word would get me beat into the middle of next week!! 

So when our President stated that swear word in jolly laughter during a discussion shared with a television celebrity back a year or so ago, instead of a line of Moms all lined up to wash his mouth out and intoning “DIDN’T YOUR MOMMA GIVE YOU ANY MANNERS? I KNOW YOU WEREN’T RAISED THAT WAY, FOR SURE!” — what we got was “oh well, I guess it’s okay to say that word now in the open…”

Here we are a year later. Our President labeles professional athletes who won’t stand for two minutes while someone else (or a recording) belts out our nation’s anthem as “sons-of-b****s” and everyone else around the nation are saying “Ummmmm I’m telling….no wait; this is the President of the United States saying this!” and 48 hours from now (the length of the regular “news cycle”), most of us will have moved onward to something else.

What we — our nation — needs is a “National Swear Jar” and it needs to be used!  Don’t know or remember what that is? 

When I was working my first job in my home town, I noticed the large pickle jar sitting on the counter beside our office’s secretary’s work area. The jar was labeled “Swear Jar” and the first day I noticed it, it already had several dollar bills inside it. Patricia, the secretary working in the Directorate of Personnel and Community Activities — DPCA — explained it to my curious face, eyes and brain.

“You’re not supposed to swear — that’s one of your Scout rules or something, right?” I nodded my head. “Well, we’re all adults here and sometimes we forget where we’re working. So Mr. Thomas (the director back then) had me find a jar and put it here. When you swear or when you hear someone else here swear, you or they put a dollar in here per swear word. At the end of the quarter, we will empty it out and use to go to that steakhouse and buy everyone’s drinks with it.”

Imagine if you will, how things would be if for every instance of the “F-bomb” you fired off, you would be fined a thousand dollars. Yeah, that’s steep. Think about the thousands of people — mostly children — who you’ve influenced by not thinking before engaging your mouth.  So you got excited at winning the Big Prize or the new car on the Price is Right and you fire out a round of explictives all which are recorded but as they say in the small print at the end of the show “This show was edited before broadcast”. In the meantime, you have to pay the National Swear Jar (no corporation, no management firm) a grand per swear word. Any bank or credit union would take the deposit and give you a receipt.

Professional athletes would pay ten thousand per word; celebrities one-hundred thousand per word; and politicians would pay a million dollars per word — and it had to come from their PERSONAL stash of money, not a political party’s nor action group’s pot somewhere. We would see just how much money our President really has every time he wants to cuss.

That money would be donated to a national non-profit each American Independence Day; and like the Powerball announcement or the stock market reports, local stations would report the increase in the amount in the National Swear Jar but would be prohibited to report on individual stories or even give count as to “which swear words were the most popular” in the preceding period of time. This is supposed to be a “national mouth cleaning” and not another national contest as to who could be the rudest, crudest, most potty-mouthed person around!

It’s either that, folks, or we start empowering parents, grandparents and great-grandparents to allow them to “clean those mouths out” with that soap and water!

Am I REALLY that old?