A Nation of Karens

The earnest young lady whips out her pen and pad and begins furiously writing my name. My heart sinks, knowing that the minute she turns that piece of paper into our 4^th grade teacher, Mrs. Lynch, I will have an easily defined case of Detention Hall. My infraction? Walking on the wrong side of the laminated line in the hallway at Edison Elementary School back in the 1970s.

Throughout the years, she has gone by many names, this earnest young lady. She has sometimes been called Suzy the Hall Monitor, as was the case in Mike Judge’s excellent satire series King of the Hill. She has sometimes emerged as Lisa Simpson from The Simpsons, the eternal do-gooder who cannot tolerate Bart’s transgressive nature. For our day and time, she proudly bears the moniker of Karen.

And she’s got your number.

Karen, you see, loves the rules. What was missing from Karen’s life before COVID-19 was the ominous cloud of arbitrary rules imposed by questionable authority. It was occasionally even miserable for her: so many people were doing what they wanted, when they wanted. For years, she carried neither pad nor pen as she did in elementary school, but she nonetheless pursed her lips in disapproval whenever some sinner passed her on the highway and perhaps drove a bit over the speed limit. She clenched her jaws tightly together when some scofflaw dared to put his recyclables in the wrong bin and went unpunished. She shook her head in vigorous judgment if her neighbor’s house wasn’t up to HOA code. What the world needed, in Karen’s mind, was a few more Clay Jenkinses to fabricate rules out of the whole cloth of crisis rather than Constitution. What was needed, in Karen’s view, was punishment. And now, a full-grown woman, Karen is not about to waste this opportunity to put all her years of hall-monitoring to work.

You see, somewhere, somehow, in some small way, someone is free, despite the ever-changing “authority” of Science^TM! Someone is out there buying whatever he wants at a store, despite the “authority” of Jenkins….or Abbott….or Trump…..or, let’s face it, Karen. Someone is enjoying his constitutionally guaranteed freedom to assemble with whom he chooses. Someone has the unmitigated gall to walk into Home Depot and buy 2-cycle fuel for his weedeater. Someone is putting gas in his car without wearing that universal symbol of Karenhood, the medical mask. And Karen is having none of it. If Karen had been around France during WWII, she would have laid down her rifle before the advancing German army, then looked around for any French resistance fighters to turn in to her new overlords. You don't count on Karen to forge a nation, save a Republic, or stand for liberty. There's risk involved in those things, and Karen is opposed to risk. Her hairdo looks like a helmet for a reason.

Her pen and pad are gone, but she yanks her smarphone from her purse like a gunslinger from the Old West. She calls the “authorities,” hoping to see Hard Cold Justice rain down on the transgressors boldly going about the business of free people. The only harm she experiences from the blatant exercise of freedom is the permanent frown lines etched into her steely, schaeudenfraude smile of ice. But she’s not about to let the offenders slide. With the week-to-week change in “rules” and “authority” and “executive orders,” now is Karen’s time. She has been preparing for this her whole life. Nor is she alone.

It turns out that we are a nation of Karens--hall monitors, peering suspiciously out our window blinds at our neighbors...waiting to write them a detention slip if they refuse to cower in terror in their homes like we do...calling them out because they do not grovel obsequiously at the cold hand of the principal's authority, never realizing that we ourselves have always been the principal. Detention Halls will come and go, but Karen will always remain—pointedly reminding us that the authority she has fraudulently borrowed from us has a shelf life as short as her attention span.

But right now, her attention is on you.