reverse bigot rage
Lately I’ve been thinking about the anger of bigots.
There is so much of it! They are angry that immigrants exist. They are angry that gay and trans people exist. They boil with rage that women who don’t want to be pregnant exist. Their ears steam when they remember non-Christians exist.
And this isn’t just a normal anger that they keep to themselves, or vent privately to friends, or bitch about online. This is anger that they fuel and stoke until it leaps from their roof to the next and gobbles up everything in its path. The anger seeks to burn and ban whatever it doesn’t like: abortion, trans kids, public expressions of queerness, books that offend the bigots, school curricula that make them remotely uncomfortable. And since this anger is the primary heat source of many state legislatures, it often succeeds in its quest.
The anger of bigots is tearing across colorful landscapes and burning them to monotone ash.
I’ve been trying to imagine what the political inverse of this anger would look like. I don’t mean the very rational protests in response to a domestic military incursion, or even the occasional fringe antics of PETA and hard-line vegans. What I mean is: What if this many people on the left went this hard for things they were angry about?
For example, I’m mad about evangelical Christians trying to make their faith the law of the land. I’d even go so far as to say their actions offend me. Imagine if I borrowed from their playbook and started hounding my neighborhood’s Little Free Libraries to remove and destroy all the Bibles, religious children’s books, and works of C.S. Lewis that I could find. Imagine me storming into a local school board meeting, accompanied by a squad of Angry Atheist Millennials, to demand that they remove all Christian texts from their libraries because any books espousing these religious values were an attack on my non-religious freedoms. Imagine.
There’s no good inverse for transphobia, because the existence of cis people doesn’t really affect or bother me, but for the sake of argument let’s just pretend that I’m as pissed off about public gender reveals — parties, social media posts, etc. — as J.K. Rowling is about trans women existing. Let’s imagine that I and my army of haters harass gender revealers on social media all day every day, reporting their posts as offensive and leaving hateful comments and exposing their content to gleeful public shaming. We also aggressively lobby our local governments to make public gender reveals illegal, claiming that they pose significant psychological threats to the unborn children whose gender roles are being placed on them before they can even consent.
Or let’s imagine that I oppose people having more than two children as strongly as right-wing Christians oppose abortion, so I build a coalition of anti-birthers who work night and day to make excessive procreation a crime in my state. Women pregnant with their third child are legally required to terminate. People expecting triplets or more? Sorry, they have to either terminate or reduce. It’s the law. If they try to move to a different state that permits them to have multiple children, well, I’ll make damn sure the authorities are empowered to chase them down and bring them to justice. Imagine the state forcing a person to keep end a pregnancy. Crazy, right?
Other things that actually make me mad on a daily basis: Gas-powered lawn tools, people idling their cars, big loud trucks (carrying nothing but a single passenger, by the way) running stop signs through my neighborhood, and a host of other antisocial behaviors that pose physical and environmental harm to everyone nearby on top of being a general nuisance. Imagine if I walked up to someone and threw their leaf blower on the sidewalk, purple-faced and shouting that they were what’s wrong with America. Imagine pounding on the windows of car idlers and demanding they turn off their engines before I call the climate police. (In this backwards version of reality, there is such a thing as the climate police. They menace wealthy suburban neighborhoods the way real police currently menace everyone else). Imagine taking a photo of a reckless driver’s license plate and posting it online to get the offender doxxed.
Imagine!
The world I’m describing here is insane. But it’s no more insane than the one we live in now.
I’m Reading/Watching:
This woman’s journey to quit sugar was the funniest thing I’ve read in a long time.
The latest Climate Town video on the dairy industry has me thinking, once again, that I ought to cut back on dairy and meat. If you’ve got a favorite plant-based recipe these days, please share it with me so I can add it to my rotation.
Nothing makes me lib out like hearing Obama speak again, but here’s a harsh and healthy reminder from Tressie McMillan Cottom: Obama isn’t going to save us. (We have to do that ourselves, unfortunately.)
I realize I need to read more and stop getting all my discourse from YouTube video essays and podcasts, but this conversation between Matt Bernstein and Matt Lieb (featuring a third anonymous contributor) was a great exploration of the antisemitism panic from the perspective of anti-Zionist Jews.
A PSA
I mentioned it briefly in the main letter above, but I want to revisit the topic of car idling for just one tiny second.
Please don’t do this.
We’re approaching a time of year in Denver where it gets hot out, and people want to leave their cars running so that they can ignore the fact that it’s hot out. But we are also approaching the time of year when air pollution levels typically increase, shrouding our view of the Rocky Mountains in brown haze and making us something of an international punch line.
In the Denver Metro Area and along the Northern Front Range, idling vehicles create an estimated 700 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions each year. That’s not nothing!
Even if you don’t think turning your one car off for five minutes will make a huge difference, you can at least feel confident in your decision to stop poisoning the air for literally no reason at all.
Roll your windows down, step outside the car, park under shade if you can find it, I don’t care. Just accept that sometimes, when it’s hot out, you are going to be hot too, and that’s okay.
Thanks, that’s all, pass it on.
