Misanthropy whether you will or no.

Guilt by association.

Words cannot express how much I loathe that concept. How many fucking situations have been horribly twisted, how many bloody people have had their lives ripped asunder, because they just happened to be proximal to something else?! The universe does not operate in sterile, discretely isolated pieces. If you happen to be the best friend of a guy later proven to be a serial killer, odds are excellent that people around you will stigmatize you based on your closeness to the criminal. Obviously, you have to be just as guilty, even if nothing can be proven. We have to divorce ourselves from the unpleasant as completely as possible lest we be viewed as collaborators. And should someone innocent be damaged by this imposed guilt, well folks can salve their conscience by proclaiming it was their own fault for dealing with those sorts. They should have known better.

Sure, things can be inferred in a general sense. If you see a group of people in prison jumpsuits in a maximum security prison, it’s a safe bet that they didn’t get there by fluffing invalids' pillows and changing infants' diapers. Thus a certain degree of guilt can be assumed. It wouldn’t have evolved as a defense mechanism if developing a level of wariness for a general group did not serve to prevent future injury.

However, that does not mean it fails to break-down within the wider scope of social interaction. Just because a blue-eyed blonde wearing glasses doused your hamster in kerosene and set it alight, it does not mean every blue-eyed blonde who needs glasses feels the need to ignite rodentia. Nor does it mean that everyone that individual interacts with on a regular basis would condone such behavior.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to see how guilt by association would impact my little world. I deal in explicitly sexual merchandise. I interact with people who maintain sexual lives. I conduct business with companies that distribute or produce sexually oriented products.

Subsequently, there is a vast array of people out there who do not see me any difference between myself and an adult movie talent scout or even with someone who traffics in slavery or excises the labia and clitoris of foreign women overseas. If it involves something related to sexuality sordid or atrocious to their way of thinking, then I am besmirched by every sin or crime ever perpetrated under that umbrella.

Fuck that noise. I have better things to do than give much credence to meat-muppets so eager to blindly condemn anything even remotely connected to things they don’t like.

At the same time, it does annoy me that my store is often deemed “unsuitable” to make charitable donations to the community at large. Granted there are many things that would be in poor taste to attempt, such as a toy drive. Yeah, that’d be just asking for trouble even if no one outside the store took issue with it. But where would the harm be if the owner wanted to chip in on a street renovation project, a local food bank, or something like Habitat for Humanity? Hell, if you’ve taken a glance at Merripan’s blog, even a whiff of scandal revokes one’s standing to do something nice for society. Nevermind that they will be accused in turn that they contribute nothing to the community other than “decadence”.

Apparently only the unimpeachable are worthy of being generous. Perhaps that’s why so many charitable organizations struggle. They’re fighting over the handful of humans amidst the six billion and growing who meet their standards.