There's so much to it, it's hard to describe. To boil it down as briefly as I can, Donald Trump and everything that surrounds him caused me to have many realizations.
While most of my realizations were about society in general, the media, Hollywood (which has a huge amount of influence), etc, the most striking revelations were about myself.
Please know that I'm not preaching or trying to convince anyone. I'm simply stating my views...
I realized that I, a white, educated member of the managerial class who lives in the modern-day equivalent of Maybury was screaming that Donald Trump and others were racist, hateful people. That was my "liberalism." I yelled names at people on the internet while I watched my big screen TV and drove my company car and accumulated useless material goods. I was a fraud. Yelling at people that they were racist or bigoted helped me to feel slightly better about myself. I had been educated in Political Science and led to believe I was a Liberal, but in the 10 or so years since college, I had changed... but I had never calibrated my beliefs. I lazily clutched an ideology that made sense for me when I was 20 and drunk and high all day.
I don't care any less about people than I ever did. I just realize that yelling names at people and signalling my virtuousness is probably worse than those who say nothing. I wasn't helping anyone but my own conscience... and even that was fake.
More than anything, what I have come to realize is that I'm not nearly as smart as I once thought I was, and I was never as open-minded as I thought I was. I made fun of people for their religious beliefs, their political beliefs, and even their mental illnesses all while claiming moral superiority because I paid lip service to nebulous terms like "diversity."
And I believe the modern Left is primarily like this. They substitute outrage for actual love. They substitute victim hood for personally making the world a better place, and they refuse to listen to any view they don't see as proper.
And there lies my biggest realization. Many people on the Left are the least tolerant individuals to have ever walked this planet. I should know - I was one of them. I and others literally asked Trump voters to identify themselves before the election, as though we were going to make them wear identification for being so stupid. I and others talked about Trump voters as if they were people who escaped mental institutions. The Left talks and acts as though they are just right so much that even if they were, you'd still disagree out of principle.
As my views on this started to change, I began noticing things I'd never noticed. For example, Liberalism permeates mainstream American culture, but it's become so common we don't even realize it. People who are against gun control are labeled as psychos by the media, and we barely bat an eye, as though defending the 2nd amendment makes someone the equivalent of Timothy McVeigh.
I also came to realize that there is a genuine and somewhat mainstream hatred for Western values. People openly mock free speech, the right to arms, and individual responsibility as though they are quaint ideals from a time gone by. They are forgetting what the world was like prior to the founding of America. It was fucking awful. The thing that has made it not awful is Western values. When this house of cards falls, we will fall back into a tortuous anarchy where the idea of social justice is laughable.
The modern day outrage over a lot of things are just benefits of living in a society so wealthy we've forgotten what strife really is. And I mean that generally. There are certainly people who are dealt a bad hand and who struggle through life day-by-day. But I often find that those people have more perseverance than the woman from Kenilworth who lives in a million dollar house and goes to protest about how she is oppressed.
Life is hard. Life is dangerous. Life is confusing. Life is short. Life is often awful. There is no one who can protect us from that. But we can do things to better ourselves and stop worrying about everyone else and their ignorance or stupidity or bigotry. The only thing we can fix is ourselves.
Again, this is not a diatribe to be preachy. I was admittedly exactly what I'm griping about a shirt time ago.
_________________ Curious Hair wrote: I'm a big dumb shitlib baby
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