... and it's deja vu all over again.
H/T to Blindyone for her latest rant, and to Empty Vessel for his previous mirror image women's issues diary.
If you were following the diaries which grew out of the Isla Vista killings in late May (see http://www.dailykos.com/... for a listing of many of those), then you may have already noticed that just about every bloody argument that was made against any of the points in those diaries has its close counterpart in this last week's comments about Black Justice/White Supremacy and institutionalized racism/privilege.
The "Oh, shit!" moment, for me, was "When you tell me to listen, you're closing off dialogue." Once I hit that, every comment brought up memories of its previous counterpart in women's issues. And it's not that the people involved (in either set of comments) have been interested in helping open the dialogue; it's simply a way to sidetrack the conversation, and it's used because, surprise!, it works pretty well to derail and defuse the real arguments being presented, at least for a while.
And the same is true, I think, for any other major issue on the site that regularly leads to major amounts of meta. Not because of any innate bigotry that permeates the site, imho, but for something perhaps a bit more subtle. I'm going to go out on a fairly long limb here, so bear with me below the fold while I see where it takes me.
These arguments tend to come up around issues that are just a hair away from being wholly viable major forces for change - not only in this community, or this country, but across the globe generally. And if and when they do, they will, each and every one of them, create a level of practical change that will be hard to deal with, no matter how much you are in favor of their theoretical primary outcomes. Augustine's "da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo" (Give me chastity and continence, but not just yet) may be a pretty fair translation for a lot of the seemingly negative arguments.
Why? Because there's just so much change we can handle well at any given moment. Each of us has our own techniques for coping with changes, and each of us, if we are honest, can remember feeling totally adrift for some length of time when things changed around us. Most of us (well, I'm speaking for myself, but I suspect it's not uncommon) have really painful memories of times when we simply couldn't cope with changes to our lives, and either withdrew and hid in a corner or made a complete ass of ourselves in the process of trying to accommodate those changes. Human adaptability is a pretty magnificent thing, but it has its limits, and they're often much lower than we might wish.
There are two sets of circumstances under which people are generally in favor of change. The first is when present circumstances in one area or another are intolerable. When you have nothing to lose by trying it, and can see the possibility for positive enhancement of your life, you go for it. And when you are reasonably sure that the impact of a change will be within your capacity to handle it, you are generally willing to at least allow, and possibly promote, the actions that will lead to it.
Outside of those circumstances, most people will do their best to impede actual change, no matter what their ideological stance. We can't help it. "Please slow down until I can catch up" is probably one of the most reliable translations of a lot of the negative comments we generally attribute to one 'ism or another.
The upside of this (from a progressive viewpoint) is that the most unstoppable changes are the ones that draw the highest levels of resistance, the most intransigent arguments, and the most thoughtful explanations, all at once. As the women's issues diaries did, and as the Black Justice diaries are doing now.
I'm left feeling very hopeful about both.