I was thinking about this recently when I met up with a friend who recently worked for a very woke organisation. We skirted round the subject for a good long while before realising we both thought the same. I thought that we needed a password!
This from a Handmaids Tale came to mind:
”It's a beautiful May day," Ofglen says. I feel rather than see her head turn towards me, waiting for a reply.
"Yes," I say. "Praise be," I add as an afterthought. Mayday used to be a distress signal, a long time ago, in one of those wars we studied in
high school. I kept getting them mixed up, but you could tell them apart by the airplanes if you paid attention. It was Luke who told me about mayday, though. Mayday, mayday, for pilots whose planes had been hit, and ships — was it ships too? — at sea. Maybe it was SOS for ships. I wish I could look it up. And it was something from Beethoven, for the beginning of the victory, in one of those wars.
Do you know what it came from? said Luke. Mayday?
No, I said. It's a strange word to use for that, isn't it?
Newspapers and coffee, on Sunday mornings, before she was born. There were still newspapers, then. We used to read them in bed. It's French, he said. From m'aidez.
Help me.”
—-
"Who told you?" I say. There's no one near, we can speak more freely, but out of habit we keep our voices low.
"The grapevine," she says. She pauses, looks sideways at me, I can sense the blur of white as her wings move. "There's a password," she says.
"A password?" I ask. "What for?"
"So you can tell," she says. "Who is and who isn't."
Although I can't see what use it is for me to know, I ask, "What is it then?"
"Mayday," she says. "I tried it on you once."
"Mayday," I repeat. I remember that day. M'aidez.
"Don't use it unless you have to," says Ofglen. "It isn't good for us to know about too many of the others, in the network. In case you get caught."
—-