Off with the kid gloves; how about boxing gloves?
For most of my life, I have valued being “considerate.” I, like many others, have claimed to value honesty while telling innumerable white lies. Even though I hated the statement “what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you” I celebrated “lies of omission”, a way of keeping others ignorant about unfortunate aspects of my life, including what I really thought about them.
I swallowed my tongue and pushed down my anger because I didn’t want to “be the bad guy.” Being nice was more important than being honest.
I know that there are times when saying what is right, or being right, is unhelpful. For example, you may honestly believe your grandma’s teal cardigan is hideous, but there probably isn’t a good reason to tell her that unprompted. If she asks, there are probably also ways to tell her your opinion without being needlessly unkind.
There is also something to be said about lying to an abusive guardian who holds disproportionate economic power over you. You’re not a coward if you choose not to be open about your sexuality, religion, or gender identity to a family member who will throw you out or abuse you if you do so. You are allowed to exercise your basic human instinct of self-preservation. They’ve created a hostile environment where honesty is punished, and you are not at fault.
However, when there are topics that are not a matter of your human survival and more a matter of the survival of your delicately constructed image, then your dishonesty not only hurts others, it hurts you.
Every time you muzzle yourself, either to “save face” or “save someone’s feelings”, you tell yourself that how other people feel about you is more important than the things you feel and believe.
Over time, that constant denial of your own right to speak and your own self worth, serves to erode your belief in yourself. At least, that is what happened to me and others who I saw struggle with self esteem.
It’s taken a few years for me to become aware of this destructive cycle, but now that I can see what is happening, I am actively choosing to speak up in as honest a way as I can as often as I can.
We live in a highly politicized world where attacking someone’s ideas is tantamount to a personal attack on the person who believes them. Knowing this, I was “sensitive” about how I framed political and theological arguments around my family. Now, I almost never hold back, unless I just don’t want to argue, in which case I will change the subject but not concede the point.
Very few people today understand that highly educated people can believe unintelligent, pseudo-scientific, extremely wrong things. If I tell you that your beliefs are unsupported by facts, and your knee-jerk reaction is to accuse me of being dismissive or calling you stupid, then that’s definitely a problem with you and not with me, and guess what?
If you continue to hold completely unsupported beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary, you are stupid. Stupidity isn’t an ableist buzzword; it’s a description of someone who is willfully ignorant.
If you lack mental capacity to understand something, you are not stupid. If you lack information on a subject, you are ignorant, not stupid.
If you choose to be ignorant, you are stupid.
If, in a debate, you are more concerned with debating how I said something, than whether or not my statement is true, you have a weak argument and likely, you are stupid.
If at any point, semantics, procedure, or decorum are more important to your movement than fighting inequality and oppression on a societal or legislative basis, then you are stupid.
Everyone on the Authoritarian Left (yes I said it) is concerned about platforming bigots, but I am tired of apologizing for stupidity. I am tired of second-guessing myself and questioning myself in the face of people whose arguments are completely disingenuous and demonstrate an egregious lack of critical thinking.
When I noticed how much the misery I experience when being gaslit in discussions by my right-wing, conservative, hyperreligious, Evangelical Christian mother was similar to the angst I experienced when reading ultra-Leftist bloggers on this platform, I realized that radical extremism is always irrational, no matter what side it emanates from.
There is a caveat though. Extremism is often inevitable, but being an extreme force for truth and equality is the best way to escape the partisanship dishonesty of most movements.
So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. --Martin Luther King Jr.
I will end with a warning. For anyone who even still reads this blog, you are going to see a shift in the content. It is going to be a little less “nice.”
But just remember, there are two kinds of “nice” people:
There are the kinds of nice people who see that you have spinach in your teeth, and bravely face the awkwardness of telling you, because as your friend, they do not want to have you suffer the public embarrassment of going through the whole night with spinach in your teeth.
Then there is the nice person, who, to save your feelings in the short term, and to save themselves the awkwardness of confronting you, rationalize that it’s better not to tell you, even though they know that when you go to brush your teeth that night and realize that you spent the whole night with spinach in your teeth, you will be embarrassed more.
America has spinach in her teeth. I’m going to tell her, and her citizens, because I care enough to be honest. I care enough to have difficult conversations, to try and help make this country a better place before everything is completely wrecked.
