Political Memes

I completely understand. In ITIL terms they're addressing the incident - the thing that is causing someone immediate harm. To continue the ITIL analogy, the problem is not being addressed and will never be addressed. I am confident humanity will never stop using the concept of mental disabilities as a slur regardless of the verbiage used.

Any 'nice' term you can think up is immediately ammo for someone to use once it starts getting traction as the new way to talk about it. "Trump has a mental disability", "republicans are mentally disabled" are two examples of what people could say until that term is no longer acceptable, and the cycle repeats.

Really what should change is that mental disabilities should be normalized so that descriptors cannot be used to degrade people based on a reality that cannot be changed.

Anyway, regardless of our best intentions, empathy, patience and understanding for others, the cycle will just keep continuing. Idiot is a great example of a word for the same thing and is used frequently and often because people simply have forgotten over the generations how it was once used. It's original term was innocuous, simply describing common individuals, not necessarily implying any truly negative thing. Eventually it was used to describe the mentally disabled, and then used as a slur, and then it fell out of favor for a long, long time. Ultimately the meaning and the application is the same. The problem remains.