I'm writing a diary in response to another diary, which is almost always a bad idea. But I'm a sentence in, so too late to stop the train now. The diary in question was about entitlement and privilege felt by a seemingly infinitely regressive series of lower rungs of the American landscape.
Why does this bother me? Is it some deep seeded guilt over my own participation in the wheels of oppression? No, because I got run over by the bus enough times to realize I wasn't the one driving it.
It is because at a base level, I believe that my political position and political party are here for all the rungs, and there isn't a test you have to pass. We are the party of the lower rung. No matter how many times the world knocks you down, we will be here trying to make things better, for all of us. Our strength has always been that we are a party of coalitions.
So, no, I don't think sorting out the proper level of contrition to be felt by any group is productive. In no way do I suggest stories of the plight of groups in this experiment should be silenced, quite the opposite. I think we should tell people 'This is what is happening in your country. This is what is happening to your fellow citizens.'
But we should be trying to persuade them, not extract some twisted validation for every injustice. Sure, maybe someone deserves the blame, but it just makes everyone harder... colder. That isn't my utopia, and that is the only real sense we have about matters of politics. Does this behavior get me closer to what I see as a fair society?
The right is turning derision into a god damned art form, and it's made this country mean. It didn't use to be like this. We didn't used to speak in terms of real and fake Americans.
I don't think the left should play that game. We want America to be a place where everyone gets a chance to succeed. We want to invest in our people.
This is not to say we live in some post-racial, post-sexist, post-homophobic or post-anything society. We don't, and we have to solve those problems. We have to solve many problems, and as a matter of simple practicality, we have to solve them together.
Fighting each other is not productive. Hate is not productive. Anger is not productive. Blame is not productive.