This is a lovely essay. Thanks for posting. Excerpts:
Speaking as a member of a queer household, I can say that although anti-LGBT sentiment is less coded here than it is in more affluent circles, the community is ultimately more accepting of difference: if you have to spend your lives together, you find a way to work it out. Local currency – respect – is earned through generosity, talent, and self-sufficiency.
Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of words about gun owners, generally, which is to say the kind of people in the place where I live. Ignorant. Backwards. Selfish. So many arguments for gun control seem to take at their core classist assumptions about who is capable of being responsible, whose needs and fears are worth hearing out; whose home town or weight or education level or dialect (’Murica, anyone?) makes them worthy of ridicule.
Instead of mocking rural Americans for owning twice as many guns as their urban counterparts, for thinking guns make them safer, ask why they’re really afraid. Because people like my neighbors sense the derision from those who have learned how to debate with a different vocabulary.
This essay works on a few different levels. First, it underscores the hypocrisy of classist coastal elites who claim to be in favor of shove-it-down-your-throats “multiculturalism” from their wealthy enclaves often with private security (c.f. “Why is Marin County So White?”). Meanwhile rural Normals might not scream about diversity and multiculturalism from the rooftops, but, as the writer says, be “ultimately more accepting of difference.”
I suspect this is why the Pink Pistols are accepted inside the gun rights community, with for instance their officials serving as plaintiffs in Second Amendment lawsuits.
Second, it illustrates the difference between the author’s liberal friends (“you’re still loved!”) and the author’s conservative friends (“you’ve been threatened? here’s training on how to shoot a gun safely.”). I suspect one is rather more effective than the other.
Your last paragraph makes me think of the “Give a man a fish, Teach a man to fish” sentiment. But isn’t that the downside to most progressive memes? San Francisco is ankle-deep in human filth, but probably filled with environmentalist wackos of every sort. I am beginning to think that one of the deep psychological deficiencies of progressive ideology is its affinity for abstract short-cuts. There are poor people, well give them food. Where do we get the food? Take it from the people who have more than they need. How do we know who has more than they need? Don’t pester me with details. Murders happened with guns. Take away the guns.
Its a cognitive dissonance, coupled with a satisfaction with abstract solutions, and the short attention span that refuses to stick around and check out whether their plan worked. But notice their affinity for abstract thought does not permit them to think in terms of principles like: property rights, free thought & speech, or natural laws like self-defense.
This is a lovely essay. Thanks for posting. Excerpts:
This essay works on a few different levels. First, it underscores the hypocrisy of classist coastal elites who claim to be in favor of shove-it-down-your-throats “multiculturalism” from their wealthy enclaves often with private security (c.f. “Why is Marin County So White?”). Meanwhile rural Normals might not scream about diversity and multiculturalism from the rooftops, but, as the writer says, be “ultimately more accepting of difference.”
I suspect this is why the Pink Pistols are accepted inside the gun rights community, with for instance their officials serving as plaintiffs in Second Amendment lawsuits.
Second, it illustrates the difference between the author’s liberal friends (“you’re still loved!”) and the author’s conservative friends (“you’ve been threatened? here’s training on how to shoot a gun safely.”). I suspect one is rather more effective than the other.
Your last paragraph makes me think of the “Give a man a fish, Teach a man to fish” sentiment. But isn’t that the downside to most progressive memes? San Francisco is ankle-deep in human filth, but probably filled with environmentalist wackos of every sort. I am beginning to think that one of the deep psychological deficiencies of progressive ideology is its affinity for abstract short-cuts. There are poor people, well give them food. Where do we get the food? Take it from the people who have more than they need. How do we know who has more than they need? Don’t pester me with details. Murders happened with guns. Take away the guns.
Its a cognitive dissonance, coupled with a satisfaction with abstract solutions, and the short attention span that refuses to stick around and check out whether their plan worked. But notice their affinity for abstract thought does not permit them to think in terms of principles like: property rights, free thought & speech, or natural laws like self-defense.