I hate to say it, but I’ve discovered a new personal coping strategy for our current sociopolitical mess.
Let me preface this by saying that I’m not a fan of schadenfreude. “Own the Libs” is part of the hatefulness that got us here in the first place, and taking pleasure in an FAFO petard is too similar a feeling. We Liberals ought to be bigger than that.
But—for sanity’s sake—I’m allowing myself one guilty pleasure: the thought that some point I’ve made or joke I’ve shared has touched a nerve and is living rent free in someone’s head. To accept their angry, insulting response not as an attack on me, but as evidence of a well reasoned and well phrased post. Something that sticks.
As E. B. White said, “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom—he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.”
His followers same same.
So why bother speaking out at all? Because silence is complicity. And too much tolerance can be.
As David Blunkett put it, “I’m a great aficionado of history. I was deeply affected by seeing the disintegration of any chance of democracy coping with fascism in the Weimar republic, where woolly-minded, well-meaning liberalism actually allowed the forces of darkness to use democracy, to exploit democracy, to overturn democracy.”
I’m a formalist poet (coder, game designer) by nature. A calling both passionate and meticulous. I can’t shut up. So I’ll practice my punchlines.