The war on all sides

I’ve been thinking about this whole wokes-war-on-reality thing lately, and I’ve been thinking about it from multiple angles. And today I saw some meme with an apparently gay man in it talking about how the wokes gradually went from asking for “tolerance” to changing the meanings of words and then to demanding obedience from the rest of society. And that’s where the “multiple angles” thing kicked in for me, and I began to ponder the whole thing again.

I haven’t gone into great detail about it here yet — not on purpose; I just never think about it when I am actually in a mood to write — but I lost both my kids over a span of a quarter-century. They’re alive; I don’t mean losing them that way. But both of them were taken from me in different ways and by two different kinds of people.

Or so it looks on the surface. Because when you get down to analyzing what actually happened and what the pretext was in both cases, you see some striking similarities.

Child #1:

Everyone wanted to punish me for doing some right things: turning my wasband in for felony crimes; ending the marriage (all but on paper; that was finalized two years later) rather than put myself into danger trying to reconcile; sending my son to live with his paternal grandmother and stepgrandfather when I knew I couldn’t give him proper resources and stability at that time.

People used the fact of my being a mediocre wife to distract from my wasband’s serious and immediate failures.

Because I chose not to believe in the fantasies that are Christianity and American political conservatism, I was Bad and deserved everything bad that happened to me.

Child #2:

Everyone wanted to punish me for doing some right things: refusing to affirm my daughter’s gender-identity delusions; refusing to allow my daughter to undergo iatrogenic harm; leaving my daughter with her father, when I could not live in that house one more minute, because I knew she was safer there despite everything.

People used the fact of my being a mediocre mother to distract from my daughter’s father’s longstanding problem with pathological dishonesty and duplicity. (My favorite bit was when he downplayed the fact he lied to me concerning a serious matter by stating that he “hadn’t known” he was going to do a thing he had told me explicitly that he was not going to do until a specific circumstance at some point in the future. The man is four years older than me. I don’t get it either.)

Because I chose not to believe in the fantasies that are gender identity and liberal sexual over-permissiveness and entitlement to boundary violation, I was Bad and deserved everything bad that happened to me.

—

Kind of startling.

I keep telling people I’ve seen this shit before. I did not simply throw that out there to be edgy out of some kind of frustration. It’s actually true. Today’s conservatives behave like liberals just invented cancel culture five minutes ago. I lost an old friend back in ‘99 because she brought up politics on an email list I had set up for several of us old high-school friends to chat, and she proceeded to shit-talk liberals, and not from a leftist point of view. Back then I still thought liberals were good guys; like most Americans, I thought the word meant the same thing as “leftist.” I proceeded to rattle off a lot of good things that self-professed “liberals” have done to improve society. She didn’t like that, and informed me that all liberals are bad because her ex said he was a liberal and he had treated her like shit. And then she flounced off. And that was the end of that. We haven’t spoken since. The rest of them proceeded to gradually fall away because I was not in lockstep with Republican orthodoxy. Guess how many of them are buying into one of them’s fantasy of being a woman now.

No, really. Guess.

My in-laws hated me for being a liberal [sic] and for not buying into Christianity and for not accepting their ill treatment of me with humility and grace. (They did throw money at me now and again, but I have a philosophy about that too; remind me to tell you about my theory of non-sexual prostitution sometime.) A lot of my own relatives hate me for being a liberal [sic] and for not buying into Christianity and for having a child out of wedlock (apparently, getting a second divorce would have been better; I promise you that any hypothetical marriage to my daughter’s father would not have lasted longer than five years). Almost none of them are speaking to me. I doubt they ever will again. I’m a very easy find on Google. That’s not the problem.

For fuck’s sake, there are entire fucking churches where the female half of the congregation shun any female newcomer for wearing trousers or for showing a half-inch too much cleavage for Sunday services. Where did people get this dumb idea that cancellation is new?

I looked at that meme today with the gay man in it and I thought about the history of Christianity, because that’s relevant. Remember, he said something about how the wokes started out asking for tolerance and then wound up changing the meanings of words and then wound up demanding obedience from the rest of society. Seriously, are we that historically illiterate now? I could change the nouns in what he said, like a demented new game of Mad Libs (no, I don’t mean rabid Democrats), and it would be a history of the Christian church from the Roman Empire onward. I am not even fucking kidding. Go fact-check me. Do it. I’m tired of people just believing things or not believing things based on their feelings at the moment. I cannot do all the heavy intellectual lifting here. You’re gonna have to pitch in, folks.

(It ain’t even that heavy, y’all. This is how far discourse has fallen. You still need to tote your share, though. Exercise: It’s good for ya.)

I could despair about all this shit, and sometimes I do come close. But another thing I thought about today is that there’s got to be a reason that so many different people end up engaging in the same stupid behavior. (Leftists might not believe in gender identity, but we’ve had our purges from time to time — a habit which, I am sad to admit, I have grown to understand better and better as I get older.) I consider how huge our worldwide species population is now, and I consider Dunbar’s number as a limit on how many people we are neurologically comfortable with knowing well. Then I consider that at no other time in history have so many millions of people been expected to follow the exact same culture, much less all lived in the same small geographical area. I kind of wonder whether we are witnessing a phenomenon that played a role, long ago, in how new cultures were created and old cultures were preserved. And it just looks weird now because the bullshit has so much more serious consequences.

Or because the people who think it looks weird are not included in the particular culture doing it. I dunno.

This is a thing I’d love to chew on a whole lot more. I think there’s something here. I am not sure that figuring it out would fix our current set of social ills. But what might do some good is if we could figure out next steps for people who’ve found that the culture they thought they belonged to doesn’t want them after all. What now?