I’ve always found this an annoying thing to say.
It’s a statement of helplessness. Every serf, peasant, and slave probably said much the same thing. You might as
well say nothing at all and at least maintain the dignity
of silence.
If the British colonists of pre-revolutionary america thought this way America would never have been born. “Well yes, this tea tax of King George is very unfair, but -
It is what it is”.
Most people, even in those days, went sheepishly along with tyranny. Some bold few bravely resisted by risking their “lives, fortune, and sacred honor”.
We seem to be losing the stalwart spirit of our forefathers. We’d rather be safe than free. “Those who choose safety over freedom deserve neither and will inevitably lose both”.
That’s a phrase often attributed to Benjamin Franklin. It’s not what he said. Google will snarkishly inform you of this while missing the point that the reworked phrase says something more important: freedom once relinquished it’s very hard to regain.
The sheep don’t care. They leave that sort of thing to the shepherds. The shepherds then fleece the sheep and enjoy mutton stew. If the sheep think about this at all, they likely think, ”well, It is what it is”.
The placid complacency of “It is what it is”
is challenged by other popular expressions like “Can’t never could” and “Nothing ventured, nothing gained”. The latter two expressions express the attitude of those unwilling to settle for less. The proportion of such folks is rarely more than 10% of any population. Bless those 10%. The world would be one contiguous serfdom without them.
There will always be leaders and followers. It’s normal. What isn’t normal is a nation like America where the typical citizen doesn’t really like being led, and equally resists being anyone’s follower.
At least that’s been the case for the last 250 some years.
In my lifetime the America spirit of confident self-determination has been steadily eroded by ever-increasing acquiescence to, “experts”, “the-powers-that-be?, and useless thinking like, “It is what it is”.
Davy Crockett, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk,
and Martin Luther King, would have had nothing but contempt for the soggy resignation of, “It is what it is”.
My grandfather would have felt the same. So do I.
Let the sheep graze, let them be eaten, let those who will not accept, “It is what it is”, live by a bolder phrase:
“It is what you make of it”.