In which I experience a momentary delusion that I can solve the world’s problems in a three paragraph text post, and am subsequently proven wrong.
I know I have some beef with the current social justice climate and how it’s handled, but I have no clue whatsoever what to do about it or how to make it better. It’s frustrating. The problem with any system is that even if it works on paper or in practice at first, it will inevitably be escalated to its most extreme, exaggerated form until it doesn’t work anymore. That’s just what happens when a large number of people decide something is good; the obvious conclusion is that more thing = more good and we end up with teacup pugs and artificially escalated, unsustainable standards of social progress that result in things like Donald Trump having a greater-than-zero percent chance of becoming president because people aren’t willing to take a small loss and just accept that Clinton is the best bet at this point. We’ve come a long way, but change happens gradually, it just does. A lot of people exist, that’s a huge volume of minds for an idea to disperse through. The pendulum swings back and forth, the main thing is to make sure the average is moving in a positive direction.
Shouting “why can’t we all just be reasonable” into the void is both unhelpful and pretentious so I’m out of ideas.
It would also probably be good to quit Othering republicans and white men and such because once you stop recognizing a group of people as people, you stop being able to communicate properly with them. If you want to change their views, learn their language instead of demanding they go out of their way to learn yours so they can be more effectively lectured at. Trust me on this, I grew up in a community of Christian homeschoolers and I’ve seen it in action. It’s not a good strategy. As an example, the argument over which neutral pronoun is the most correct. The vast majority of the population is still getting the hang of the concept of more than two genders. If someone who wouldn’t have before is now willing to start calling someone they/them, that is NOT the time to complain that ze/zer is better. Let people catch up and consider new ideas, don’t scare them off by seeding the learning curve with land mines.
And that individual level is important, because once one republican white dude is on board with it, his fellow republican white dudes are going to be more inclined to listen to and start to emulate him than they are the liberal nonbinary person who explained it to him, because Othering goes both ways. Over time it gets normalized, and yes you’ll still have people who refuse to accept it, but they’ll eventually become a minority and the overall cultural climate will change.
I’m just gonna stop now, this post is a mess.
