Dateline — Philadelphia, July 25, 2016. Now is the summer of our discontent, as you all know, and as Hoagiefest recedes into memory, the garbagey breeze has blown in from Cleveland and with it, a hot wind of white male angst. How do they get their country back?, they’d like to know. Has the whole system gone insane? It has, it will continue, and it will infect even the things they hold dear, things as sacred as Wawa itself.
It started out innocently enough, on July 14th, with the beloved regional accessory to America’s obesity epidemic posting the above on Facebook. They made a pun about bagels, the word “bae,” and “goals.” As puns go, it was cute enough. But members of Wawa’s faux-endangered white male constituency looked into this post and saw only more of the same damning evidence they see in all things these days. They saw their cultural influence melting like the glaciers they couldn’t agree were melting. They saw the de-evolution of their language, with apparently no shred of the cognitive dissonance that allows slang to keep languages alive. They saw the wicked eyes of Beyonce Knowles. And then, they made their voices known.
"Wawa, please don't degrade yourself like this. Youre better than that,” said a father of two in North Carolina.
"Use the word bae again Wawa and I swear it's no more hoagies for me,” threatened a man from the Digital Marketing & Personalization Team at Verizon in East Brunswick, New Jersey.
"Wawa... you might have lost my business because of the word ‘bae' please stop i love Wawa,” said a grown-ass man whose profile pic was Darth Vader along side the quote “Suck My Robot Balls,” which is something Darth Vader never said.
To their eternal credit, Wawa has not entered the fray, peacefully allowing history to take its course. As of this writing, Hoagiefest is still being celebrated for all who wish to engage with it.
