November 11, 2024

Your outrage is good enough

Posted in Uncategorized tagged Culture, Election 2024, Politics at 6:41 pm by chavisory

[Another one I drafted on Facebook. Hope everyone’s taking care this week.]

My sister DM’d me the day after the election to say “I’m spinning, I can’t imagine how you must be feeling.”

And yes, I’m politically far to the left of her, probably. Yes, I’m queer and she isn’t. Yes, I’m disabled and she isn’t. I appreciate all of that. And there are groups of people in far more danger than either one of us is, and yes I think we need to very explicitly stand up for those people harder than ever right now.

But you know what, also—

If you’re devastated because of what this means for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, for the climate, for our planet, for Ukraine, for the very concept of rule of law, for national security, healthcare, or because Trump doesn’t represent the future you wanted for your kids, or just because of the normalization of callousness, obscenity, lying and basic lack of decency, if you’re just appalled and sickened by the openness of the hate-mongering towards fellow Americans, if you grew up being taught that racism was wrong and you believed that we were supposed to try to make America better, if he’s a walking affront to your Christian values? You just can be. Any of those things is enough.

Your feelings don’t have to be smaller than anyone else’s. Certainly not mine. You can be as furious and sad as this makes you. You can say “This isn’t what I want, actually,” and not have to justify it based on who you are or aren’t.

I think we need more average Americans being willing to speak incredibly openly about why you find this appalling and you’re not on board with it. I think some of the ways that the online and activist left, of which I have also been very critical over the years, as many of you know, has pushed of talking about things, have unnecessarily alienated us from each other, and in this case, I think the more people who will talk about why you’re devastated over the results of this election, no matter who you are or aren’t, the better.

I think it’s deeply valuable and important for people who assume everyone like them or who lives where they do shares their beliefs to see that no, actually, it isn’t just the radical left or supposed coastal elites who have a problem with this. For whatever reason that is for you.

And the social justice movements talk a lot about listening to marginalized people, and yes, I want you to do that… but in ways I think it does not help when the result of that is that all of us are going around parroting the same six things that we know we’re supposed to say.

“Be kind to our language,” Timothy Snyder wrote in On Tyranny, in a chapter I’ve cited before recently, and likely will again. “Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying.”

Sloganeering can be powerful, to be sure. But right now especially, if you are outraged, for you, for your country, for your children, you’re allowed to articulate a reason why, in your own words, for your own reasons.

Permalink Leave a Comment