We're all watching racist nutjobs screaming about socialized medicine and spreading hate. They don't like a black man as president. These are folks who value authority, who tend to think that power makes you right; to have a black president is the ultimate affront to everything they believe. To change the social contract to actually care a little bit for the least of us, that's everything they've spent their lives...often their very hard lives...being told is the loss of autonomy, communism, a relation to others which is obscene, something you should die to stop. Times are hard. And they have mean white men on the television egging them on, a hate machine which has been growing my entire life. If you aren't freaked out a little, you probably aren't paying attention.
So what I want to say...it isn't likely to be popular. Chill the fuck out. If there is a shot to be fired, let them fire it. And let it the hell go. Civilization, for all its strength and resilience, is a thin veneer over great suffering. We need it. And you do not get it by comparing this to Rwanda, by appealing to our own fear and anger, by dragging out the worst and angriest forms of caricature. You get it by being a decent human being. And that never counts more than when the chips are down, when civility is fragile.
Yep, this is the blogosphere. We live on advocacy and rants and outrage, and we have a long line of angry, not especially stable camp followers. Many of them have been shaved thin and beaten hard by our culture and society, which are not kind and have little give. And you know what? All art is powerful, even bad art. Even our art. I don't believe in impression management, in telling the world what we think will win. Most of the time, it is the truth that will win, not some set of bullshit arranged to your goal. But even a dog that could read would get that this is a genuinely scary time in our country. Put the gasoline and matches away. Yep, it is bad. Don't make it worse.
I'm a transsexual. I've lived 15 going on 16 years of my life at threat of real violence every damn day. And you know what? Those right wing assholes, when someone isn't lighting a fire under them and egging them on? They can be damn decent human beings, possessed of individual grace and courage which would take your breath away. Very few people only have two dimensions. I'm not saying be gentle in your rhetoric, or fail to paint them as the fuckwads they are being right now; but every single human being contains a universe. Chances are good at least a few of those universes will come to an end in the coming days. There is not a damn thing you can say, not an idea you can have, not a point you can make, that is worth the life of one bitter, right wing, fascistic old man. Before you write it, think about how riled up and freaked out folks are right now, and how long they have been marginalized. Not just them. Us.
Something else I've learned from being trans...we're not all that damn far from third grade. We are all living with a burden of shame and fear and anger, and in every single moment of your life, in every action, you invite decency and grace, or you invite violence and hate. Sometimes, sometimes, you get the violence and hate anyway. But if you feed it...that is always what you will get. That doesn't make it right or deserved. But if progressivism is about anything to me, it is about the very long fight for human dignity. You will not get it by advocating violence, or by making this out to be more than it is.
In 1989 and 1990 I lived in Jerusalem. It was the first Intifada. It took awhile to get through my very young brain, but I learned then and have never forgotten that once a society becomes radicalized, once the bitterness of social division has reached a certain point, everything that people work and love and fight to create is reduced, washed away, broken before it begins. If I had grown up African American, I could likely have learned that on 14th Street. It seems to me very real and very possible that the United States could go in that direction. If it doesn't, probably it won't just be because our institutions hold together, kind of, in the face of economic upheaval, racism, and anger. It will be because we imagined something good, and acted -- even in the face of hate and fury -- to make it true.
I'm not saying dress it up nice. I'm saying...think twice before you write that screed. Right now, think three times.
Thanks for reading.
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