May 30, 2020 6 min read

When I was growing up in the 1970s, my friends and I called her Marge. Marge was never her name. But it sounded about right. She acted a lot older than she was. You know. Out of touch. Uptight. Controlling. A know-it-all.

Marge.

Our neighborhood had a lot of them.

Marge was the woman who’d peer through the window and yell at us for letting our dogs even sniff at her lawn. She was the mom who supervised our backyard red rover battles and worriedly warned us to “not get too rough,” even though the purpose of the game was to try to fracture the arm bones of your friends while racing full speed into their locked hands. Marge gave out pencils at Halloween, drove the speed limit while holding the steering wheel at 10 and 2, and wiped our faces with her own spit so we smelled like mouth. We tolerated a lot of Marges. And we vowed never to become like her.

Marge, I’d like you to meet Karen.

Karen is the modern-day Marge. Just more toxic. And far more dangerous.

You know a Karen. You probably know a LOT of Karens. You may even be a Karen.

Who is she?

Karen is the person who demands to talk to the manager when she finds even the slightest flaw in her drive-thru order. She’s the mom who’s made all youth sports unbearable and every teacher wince. Urban Dictionary describes her as a housewife. A soccer mom. A minivan driver. A micro-manager. I’ll take Karen a step farther and say we’ve all been her at some point in our lives. But then we grew up. Karen never does. She doubles and triples down on her own annoyance and demands that the world and all its occupants behave the way she does.

(In an effort to be fully inclusive, a male Karen is an Alan. He’s just as noxious.)

The difference between 1970s Marge and today’s Karen is largely driven by two independent but mutually destructive forces: social media and “the news.” (We can debate the benefit of the mainstream media later, but for today’s purposes, let’s just agree that our modern news people are a far cry from Walter Cronkite and Edward Murrow.) With her finger on her iPhone’s record button, Karen is armed and ready to blow in any person not living life the way she thinks they should. She uses Facebook and Twitter like swords on her belt, slashing her way into newsfeeds and Next-door group chats by guilt-shaming those who step out of line. Mainstream news outlets are the gasoline to Karen’s flame. They take her torch to a national level, sloshing incendiary fake news headlines and faux video across the land, inflaming other Karens to take charge of their own burning outage.

Who are these Karens, you ask?

How about Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot? Over this past Memorial Day weekend, gun violence left 10 people dead and 48 wounded in Chicago. It was the deadliest Memorial Day weekend in five years. Rather than tend to the carnage, Lightfoot ordered a raid on a black South Side church that dared to hold services in defiance of her orders. Lightfoot sent armed police officers to the Chicago Cornerstone Baptist Church and posted a dark car with tinted windows outside the church doors to film the incident through an open window. Seriously? Shaming a church and its worshippers? The pastor said he felt like he was confronting “the Soviet-style KGB” as officers pounded on the locked door and demanded an end to his to his sermon. What’s more dangerous? Thugs with guns or neighbors who want to pray? Oh, Karen.

Then there’s the woman walking her dog off-leash in a protected section of a New York park. When an avid bird watcher asked her to kindly leash her animal (as per posted rules), this Karen went berserk and called police, claiming the man (who is black) was threatening her (she is white). Race, of course, had nothing to do with her breaking the rules, and the man’s video of the testy exchange has now gone viral. Don’t mess with a Karen who believes signs don’t apply to her and then tries to play the race card.

Did you see the grocery store mob in Staten Island? A group of incensed and foul-mouthed Karens verbally abused a mask-less shopper pushing her cart down the aisle. No one asked whether she had a medical condition that prevented her from wearing a mask. It was none of their business. But they made it so, shouting a tapestry of profanity and chasing after her until she abandoned her cart and fled the store.

The attorney general in Michigan is a Karen, too. Dana Nessel suspended 77-year-old Karl Manke’s barber’s license, issued a cease and desist order, and issued a temporary restraining order against his Owosso, Mich., barbershop when Manke reopened his business and defied the state’s stay-at-home order. A Michigan Court of Appeals judge intervened and ruled Manke did not have to close. But Nessel doubled-down, calling Mr. Manke selfish and alleging his being open was “allowing the virus to spread.” Dana Nessel is a COVID-shaming, fear-mongering Karen. She knows better than a man who has successfully and safely cut hair for more than half a century.

Did you see the photo of President Trump golfing over the weekend? The photographer lurking in the weeds on the Mar-O-Lago Golf Course is a Karen, too. This person apparently knows more about Trump’s responsibilities as commander in chief than he does. Go figure. The accompanying CNN headline: “On Memorial Day Weekend, Trump Shows His True Self.” Gasp. Media Karens are a dangerous lot. They believe they know how Trump should spend his time. Thank goodness an accompanying CNN story takes Karen’s outrage even farther by tabulating how many days Trump has golfed compared to President Obama. (Insert eye roll here.) Karens have a lot of free time, apparently.

If we truly are “all in this together,” then may I kindly suggest that the Karen inside each of us, that selfish, virtue-signaling, I-know-better-than-you-do, guilt-shaming, fear mongerer put a sock in it. It’s amazing we’ve managed to live all these years without a loud-mouthed Karen telling us how to do so.