Please Stop Keeping Calm
Connor Strange
Staff Writer
An obnoxious, bland font, an overabundance of nonsensical parodies and an overall saturation are all contributing factors of why the “Keep Calm and _____” meme is something that I truly detest.
It started out simply enough in the late 30s as a British public safety poster. “Keep Calm and Carry On” stated the red banner, a message with noble intentions in the face of the escalating World War II.
And then it went away. World War II ended, and with the conclusion, the posters were largely decommissioned. That should’ve been the end of it, right? The Nazi terror had subsided, the Japanese had surrendered and Mussolini was horribly savaged by his own people. The world would be mostly at peace for years to come. It was an ushering in of an unfortunately short-lived tranquility, so the Brits really didn’t need to be reminded to “keep calm”.
Then someone dug it out from somewhere, and it resurfaced in the 2000s. Following that, a t-shirt company printed a spoof of the long-lost slogan on a blue garment, boasting the phrase “Now Panic and Freak Out”. Not many had used the saying at the time, so it seemed pretty funny.
And then more companies started to utilize the saying. And then more. It continued in this manner until a migraine-inducing cacophony of posters filled the internet and even seeped into real life. A Google image search of “keep calm” will yield countless unique results -- and I mean countless.
Fortunately, this foolish fad is on the descent of popularity. With any luck, it will fade from memory in the next couple of years as it did after the collapse of the Third Reich.
