To be a cultural citizen of the United States means to believe in the They.  They are the nameless, faceless swath of Otherness, the group of people to which you and I and the people in immediate earshot do not belong. They can be Islamic terrorists, Christian fundamentalists, rogue cops, vegans, Hassidic Jews, Dittoheads, the editorial staff of the New York Times, or the Conspiracy of J. R. Dobbs.  They desire power, secretly or no, but They are obviously unfit for it, and it’s only up to you and me and the other sane decent people to join the struggle against They.

We never tell you the names of They; that would require too much intellectual rigor on our part, and anger gives us sharper words than clarity when we talk about They. Anyway it would be both legally and morally actionable if we gave you names. They might sue, or worse yet, They might post on our timelines. Ergo They must remain formless and disembodied. The membership of They seems, superficially, to be defined by what makes We angry. But if We were willing to be honest (and We aren’t), then We would whisper to you that They are truly defined by what We fear.

We haven’t talked to They in a while. We unfriended and blocked They a while ago… when They posted that thing.  Motherfuckers, all of They.

Since assaulting They requires physical exertion, and since naming the They requires more thinking than is comfortable, our best solution to containing the They involves group monitoring.  We want editors-at-large, formal oversight committees, body cameras, snarky sound bites, internal audits, grand jury indictments, and we want it to be televised in thirty minute loops and simulcast on the Internet.  They will not get away with it.

They should be pilloried virtually, digitally. They should get comeuppance, in one hundred forty characters or less.  And we want to scroll and seethe and Share the anger. Yes yes yes, We knew it, We believed it in our bones: it was They all along.  Click Like if We are We.