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The America I Grew Up In, Now Gone
Ever notice that certain people lose their cool whenever a conservative claims that the America he grew up in is disappearing? It doesn’t matter whether the claim is made by Donald Trump, the Tea Party, the Chamber of Commerce, or the RINO squish brigade. Mere mention provokes apoplexy on the Left.
“You preferred the America where blacks were getting hosed in the streets?” they howl. “When gays were discriminated against and couldn’t live openly? You think those were the good old days? You liked it better when the poor, the elderly, the sick, and the uninsured were just abandoned and left to fend for themselves?”
Well, gee, I don’t know. When you put it like that …
For those who may be interested, when I say the America I grew up in is disappearing, I’m talking about the loss of social values and attitudes that even the Left used to revere: the right to speak your mind, a belief that hard work should be rewarded, a commitment to expanding economic opportunity, the right to be left alone.
These things are disappearing. Even the language used to describe them is disappearing. We observe it happening. We feel it happening. But if we say that it’s happening … KABOOM! … we find ourselves in the crosshairs of the social justice sniper unit.
Curt Schilling, come on down.
I won’t rehearse the details. You’ve probably read about them. Suffice it to say that, this week, a man lost his job for making political comments in public that the giant corporation employing him disagreed with. He got fired for his opinions.
There was a time, still within living memory, when the idea that someone could lose their livelihood for expressing a political opinion — or any opinion — was an outrage. And it was an outrage felt not just on the political right but by the political left as well. Indeed, it was felt keenly by every American.
We used to think that our freedom made us unique in the world. We had freedom of speech. We could express ourselves, and our political opinions, without fear of being shamed, suppressed, erased, or visited by the thought police. The Left used to be the fiercest defenders of this ideal.
Didn’t you see Trumbo?
Some will say, “Hey, ESPN is a private company. They can do what they want. They could fire the guy for not keeping his nose hairs in check. His public comments reflected poorly on the company.”
Maybe. But when you see Curt Schilling, you don’t think, “Hey, there goes the ESPN guy.” No, you think, “Hey, there goes that loudmouth right-wing baseball pitcher who had the fake blood on his sock.”
(Sorry about that list bit. I’m a Yankee fan.)
Last I checked, it’s not a crime to be a loudmouth, or to be right wing. Last I checked, dissent was patriotic. I always thought that patriotic dissent included the right to dissent from certain social orthodoxies and certain faddish opinions.
Admittedly, I haven’t checked in a while.
I’ve been fired. The reasons given were not terribly convincing. The boss was the boss, though. It was his company, so I took the hit and moved on.
But the guy that fired me didn’t take to the media basically to denounce me as a bigot. ESPN did that to Curt Schilling. And they did it for the purpose of signaling their total agreement with the belief that some opinions are no longer valid. The implication: The people who hold such opinions should be punished.
Does that sound like America to you?
It’s hard to believe, but there was a time in this country when liberals insisted that what a man did and said in his personal life had no bearing on whether he could adequately do his job. Unfortunately, that time is rapidly receding in the rearview.
Somebody has to say it.
Published in Culture
I don’t think that bringing up an episode from US history where people lost their jobs for making political comments is a very good way to convince people that people in the past didn’t lose their jobs for making political comments.
The default position is that there are no more debates. Whatever policy the left has decided upon is a state of perfection.
To stop you from disagreeing with them you must be disqualified. Whites may not talk race, straights may not talk sex or gender, men may not talk of abortion.
Thanks for missing the point.
Like Misthiocracy, I am very skeptical that this is anything new.
Is the author really claiming that a public figure in the 1960s/70s/80s would have never been fired for going on national TV and loudly voicing an opinion which ran counter to the public trend?
Here’s what’s really changed over the last decades:
Schilling’s sin is not that he held the wrong opinion but that he held yesterday’s opinion.
If held a new wrong opinion then he would be “controversial” or perhaps even a hero.
Here’s the ESPN statement regarding Schilling’s dismissal http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/20/media/espn-dismisses-curt-schilling/index.html
I don’t think ESPN understands the meaning of the word “inclusive”. Recall, this is the same outfit that celebrated Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn Jenner.
This presidential year has redoubled my feeling that an old world is passing away and what’s replacing it is far worse.
The idea that the Republican Party may be led by Donald Trump merely illustrates a much bigger problem.
I remember when the illegitimacy rate in America was about 5%. Now it exceeds 40%. I remember when the vast majority of Americans, religious and non-religious, subscribed to roughly the same moral code. Not any more.
All of which gives us reason to contemplate a few bits of wisdom.
First, from Willa Cather’s novel Shadows on the Rock. A character criticizes the military governor of Quebec: “He liked to reorganize and change things for the sake of change, to make a fine gesture. He destroyed the old before he had clearly thought out the new.”
Second, from C. S. Lewis: “There are some mistakes which humanity has made and repented so often that there is now really no excuse for making them again. One of these is the injustice which every age does to its predecessor.”
Finally, Michael Oakeshott’s description of the left: they have “no sense of the cumulation of experience . . . .: the past is significant only to [them] as an encumbrance.” For them, “nothing is of value merely because it exists (and certainly not because it has existed for many generations), familiarity has no worth, and nothing is to be left standing for want of scrutiny.”
I feel like the dinosaur who just saw the asteroid.
Rush mentioned this on his show last week, that a lot of these companies that are politicizing themselves. Like ESPN, Disney, Paypal, the NFL and the like will, eventually feel the pain from this march towards leftism.
People watch ESPN, for sports, not politics. I mean they hired Keith Olbermann AFTER he was at MSNBC. Also I think Mike Ditka had some issue with ESPN radio as well. But as more and more things because politicized it will turn a lot of folks off, and these companies will feel the pinch if they haven’t already.
Yeah, you’re right…but this issue is only about 5 minutes old isn’t it?
That’s what makes it so good. Freshness!
I agree. Businesses would have been far more afraid of the backlash against them for harming someone simply for “speaking his mind” than they were afraid of the backlash against them for not punishing the person by humiliating and firing the person.
Perhaps prominent people will start working “free to speak” clauses in their contracts from now on. It’s getting crazy out there. I hate it.
Social media has made mob tactics acceptable. It’s truly frightening.
That said, public figures are held to a different standard in what they can and cannot say. That has always been the case. This is not Schilling’s first controversial remark on social media. He got in trouble last summer for a tweet comparing muslims to nazis. He’s had some other twitter rants, including one defending creationism, that didn’t get him in trouble, but got rather ugly. He has been warned repeatedly about his online activities.
Social media isn’t talking to your buddy on the golf course. Being deliberately provocative and controversial will get you in trouble when you’re a public figure. If you want to be a social commentator and policy advocate, go be that. If you want to be a baseball analyst be that. Don’t blur those lines. I hate it when leftist sports announcers do it (Keith Olberman) I have the same standard for people on the right.
New Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say and will fight till your death!”
The herd is everything.
For generations, we’ve been urged to reject the repression of bourgeois middle-class America. Let everyone do what they want. No more taboos.
Instead of self-reliant individualists, however, we’ve wound up with a huge herd of robots and zombies who move straight from college campuses to facebook mobs. Each new zombie wants you to affirm their individual choices (I am a woman, despite my penis!) while simultaneously denying you the right to be your own individual.
Yeah, I know I’m complaining. Maybe I’ll just hide in the bathroom until this whole things blows over. On second thought, never mind …
Also, does ESPN know their audience? Probably about 95% of their audience agree with Schilling. Why not make it a segment to discuss the matter? ESPN has been losing their audience audience, steadily over the past few years.
If you’ve ever read about the Culture Revolution in China this sounds very familiar.
What I find the most interesting–and shocking–aspect of Donald Trump’s candidacy is that he hasn’t, to my knowledge, resigned from his position as CEO of the Trump Organization.
Most modern organizations would fire a CEO who said some of the offending things Trump has said. He’s alienating a huge segment of his potential market.
He must be a majority stakeholder.
He is the brand, and he is very much harming it.
Which is actually a plus in my mind in that he is putting a lot on the line to run for president. I keep seeing people say that he is doing it to increase his brand’s market share. Nothing could be further from the truth. He is putting it all at risk. He is either behaving admirably or irresponsibly. I’m thinking admirably. He could lose everything he has built.
Where I work I have heard some of our HR people use the quip, “too stupid to work here.” ESPN is a media company. When Schilling posts something, fairly or unfairly, it reflects on his (former) employer. So I have zero sympathy for him.
I know that’s not your point, so I’ll add that while the social construct may be going into social destruct, this is not a good example.
I want to take these one at a time…
“You preferred the America where blacks were getting hosed in the streets?” they howl. — I was born in the late 1960’s so I have not seen this in my lifetime.
“When gays were discriminated against and couldn’t live openly? You think those were the good old days? — So is it ok that now Conservatives, in particular Christians, are discriminated against for adhering to values they have held for centuries?
You liked it better when the poor, the elderly, the sick, and the uninsured were just abandoned and left to fend for themselves? — This has not been the case since FDR was President, again before I was born.
I am perfectly willing to return to the good old days when Ronald Reagan was President.
Yes. The Big Lie (one of them anyway) was that their movement was and is about “equality” and “inclusiveness” when in reality it’s pure projection.
The past, as they tell it, full of bigots who marginalized people and set up systems of oppression to keep them down…and this is precisely what they are doing but they’ve convinced themselves (and the culture at large) that they’re really champions of “diversity”, “openness”, “inclusiveness”, etc while they go about firing people, bankrupting them, depriving them of their livelihoods and creating a toxic political and cultural climate designed to shut up opponents.
Also, progressives do tend to freak out about the 50s/60s when someone mentions “the America I grew up in” but will then go on about the wonders of the unionized economy of the 50s/60s. The left loves to decry the morals and institutions of the past while pushing statist ideas that go back 100+ years and have proven to be utterly disastrous.
Explain to me, in small words, why the operative lesson is not “therefore, we must control the mob.”
I’ve been wondering recently how many sports reporters actually care about sports. It makes sense that the liberal media would send their social justice police into the world of sports, as it is traditionally male-dominated, competitive, and in general represents a sort of last bastion of traditionally masculine-ish virtues.
I dislike the phrase myself because it’s vague. It is an emotional appeal to nostalgia which lumps together a stew of culture, politics, and beliefs. The problems of the moment always seem larger, more threatening, than anything faced in the past. It’s why people tend to believe crime is up, gun violence is out of control, and their children are more at risk than ever, when the opposite of all those things is true. “This isn’t the America I grew up in” is tedious and lazy. It’s brother of “the wrong side of history.”
Tolerance only for people who agree with me is the new orthodoxy. It’s not going to change without civil war.
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All sports “journalists” are liberals with a chip on their shoulder, jealous and angry that the so-called real journalists get all the respect. This is one reason why they try to be edgy and make their stories about social controversy. “I’m using sport for the progressive cause”, etc, that kind of mentality.
This is the core part of the OP for me. This is the conversation that the left and the right really need to have with each other.
By expanding the reach both of our speech and of our reactions to speech, real freedom of speech is more genuinely possible for more people and more potentially punishable by more people than it has ever been before.
These are responsibilities most of us have never had to exercise before. If we blurted out the contents of our foolish, muddled minds at the dinner table, or down at the pub, or in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper… the damage to ourselves and others was self-limiting. Archie Bunker could say whatever he wanted in his living room and none but Edith could hear or take offense.
Using Facebook, e-mail and Twitter can feel like speaking—and speaking, moreover, in an intimate setting; just Archie and his I-phone, opining from his old wing-chair… but the messages are received as writing, broadcast like tabloids and reacted to by hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. The “dialogue” is then preserved (jot, tittle and silly emoji) as if incised in cuneiform on clay tablets for the space aliens to interpret…
“Tolerance only for people who agree with me is the new orthodoxy…”
Do social conservatives just want to be left alone… or do they hope to impose another, better way on others?
The black people being hosed thing is stupid. Almost nobody has ever seen that. I don’t know if there are other instances of it, but the one we always hear about was Bull Connor, who in a particular moment in history, turned hoses on protesters. Protesters, not blacks in general, even if they were mostly black, though I imagine there were whites there too. He was a jerk, and, as we learned from Ann Coulter, was removed from that position after 2 0r 3 months. This is like the myth of lynching, the myth being that lynching happened only to blacks and because they were black, when in reality the motivation for a lynching was belief that the victim had committed a very serious crime (usually murder or rape, and they could have been guilty), and it happened to whites too, I think more, though I suppose it was disproportionate for blacks.
The poor, elderly, and sick were most definitely not abandoned, not even before FDR. In fact the common idea that people were left on the streets is absurd because vagrancy was a crime.
As for the gay thing, I think the idea that it was better for society when gays were less open has been proven within our lifetime. Being forced to celebrate homosexuality is anti-social behavior.
I think I disagree. The fact that Schilling should have known that today’s mentality could cost him his job does not make this a bad example of the intolerance that is suppressing speech today. In fact, the issue itself–which is undeserving of the importance that the social justice warriors have placed on it–makes it a pretty good example of the point.