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The Whole World Makes Them Mad
I drove from Orlando to Savannah this weekend and stopped for gas somewhere along I-95 in rural Georgia. I pulled into the pump right behind a Subaru station wagon with Virginia plates (which I presume are from Alexandria, not Roanoke), with the back covered in all sorts of left-wing bumper stickers: Coexist in religious symbols, Eat Local, all sorts of peace vs. war stickers, Love Our Mother (with a picture of the Earth), Hillary 2016, and so on and so forth.
I suspect these are standard equipment, or at least an inexpensive option, on a Subaru. There were two women in the car, I’d guess in their late 20s, who I believe were partners. One had shoulder-length blondish hair, the other had a crew cut. Both wore baggy jeans and sweatshirts, both were a bit overweight (I cast no stones here…), and both had nose rings. Crew cut girl had a wallet in the back pocket of her jeans, with a long silver chain attaching it to her belt. They looked like they were doing a parody of lesbians – working hard to meet every stereotype. If they were in a Saturday Night Live skit, they would get complaints from the LGBTQ community.
When I went into the gas station to use the restroom, I noticed that someone was walking behind me, and I reflexively held the door open and stood aside, allowing that person to enter first. It was one of the ladies from the Subaru, and she brushed past me without looking at me and mumbled “thanks” in a sarcastic tone, like I had just handed her a used Kleenex. She was pissed. And she exuded unpleasantness. I thought to myself, “There goes a very unhappy person.”
I have two lesbian couples in my medical practice. All four of those ladies are over 60, in stable long-term relationships, are conservative politically, and are just the nicest ladies you’d ever want to meet. I always look forward to seeing them. They’re happy, comfortable in their own skin, and they care about other people.
I have no idea if young lesbians tend to be progressive and if older lesbians tend to be conservative. That is not what this post is about, and I hope the comments below don’t pursue such speculation.
My point is that it was obviously not her sexual preference that made the Subaru lady unpleasant at the gas station. It was her progressive politics. It seems that her progressivism makes her unhappy. And it’s easy to see why.
She hates the evil oil companies who seek to destroy the earth, but she just gave $50 to Exxon.
She hates big banks and giant international corporations, but she paid that $50 with her Visa card, who makes a profit on her support of Exxon.
She hates capitalism, but she just bought a tall can of organic iced tea in a gas station in rural Georgia. That is possible only in a capitalist system, and she knows it. Saint Bernie says capitalism gives us too many choices of shampoo etc, but nobody in rural Georgia drinks organic iced tea. Only urban progressives traveling through. So they have it.
She worships planet earth like a god and hates humans for having any impact on the natural world at all. But she travels by interstate because it’s so convenient.
She hates the condescension of the patriarchy, but when some chubby guy in sweats opens the door for her, what is she to do but walk through? A snarky “thanks” does little to conceal her understandable irritation.
I would be irritable too, if I had just done five things I hate in the past two minutes.
The whole world must make her mad. No wonder she’s irritable. I just can’t imagine. I don’t have the energy to maintain that much frustration. Especially if my life has been made obviously and immeasurably better by the oil companies, banks, international corporations, capitalism, highways, and western culture. Could some of those things stand some improvement from time to time? Sure. But so could I, frankly. And presumably, so could she. But self-improvement is difficult and unpleasant. It’s easier to demand improvement from others, I suppose.
But is it? Because if the only way for you to be happy is for other people to do what you want, then you’ll never be happy. Never. Happiness becomes absolutely impossible at that point. So anger becomes your only option.
The anger of progressives is scary. And getting scarier. Political violence has always been a characteristic of the left, and I can see why. The whole world makes them mad.
And the better our lives become, the angrier they are going to get. So how do you make people like that happy? I hate to even contemplate that.
What an unhappy existence. I feel bad for progressives. I really do.
I also fear them. Our public discourse has gotten nasty and vicious. I suspect that increased political violence is very likely soon, perhaps even in this next political election.
This is going to get nasty.
It’s understandable, I suppose, if you try to look at it from the perspective of progressive true believers. The whole world makes them mad, and they reach the point where they feel the need to lash out.
I feel bad for them. But I feel worse for the rest of us. This is going to get nasty.
Published in General
Last summer my family took a long road trip, and at an of the out-of-the-way national monument we stopped at we saw a vehicle plastered with bumper stickers for various progressive causes and politicians. It was clearly a vehicle belonging to an employee at the park, and my husband joked that there must a crazy liberal there. We went in, and aside from a couple of others, were the only visitors at the monument. While there, my husband started chatting with a volunteer, an older gentleman, who offered to take us on a hike. He was amazing. His knowledge of the park, historical artifacts, and the natural environment was extensive, and he clearly loved what he was doing. We walked back out to the parking lot to get in our car to follow his vehicle to the trail head, and to our surprise he got into the bumper sticker car. We took it as a lesson not to judge someone too harshly based on their bumper stickers until we got a chance to chat and know them a little better. Some people like to wear their politics on their sleeve, and in this case their car, but it does not completely define them.
That’s why the battle is to be the Alpha victim as a group, and why so many people seeking power want to be the self-appointed leader(s) of that group, so in theory they get to tell everyone else what to do, and how to live their lives.
The contradiction is in victimology you have to at least act the victim in some way, but the angry ones out there want their victimhood to be affirmed by the government, and at the point of a gun wielded by government officials taking orders from them. You can’t get to ultimate power without ripping the victim mask off sooner or later, so you end up with a bunch of self-proclaimed victims acting like totalitarians, including against other supposed victims. It only works if society allows it to work, and as things like the fights between transgenders and lesbians have shown, even some of the people who were playing the game are getting fed up with it.
The Pete Buttigieg phenomenon. Buttigieg was far more successful than his resume would have predicted in the campaign, because he came across as one of the more calm and reasonable Democrats …. until you started talking to him about religion or Mike Pence. Then it was like someone saying “Niagara Falls” in the old vaudeville routine.
Some people are so consumed with politics that’s all they can talk about, and their anger never abates. Others simply have 1-2 buttons that set them off when pushed, but can act perfectly normal as long as you stay away from those trigger words or topics.
The movie Dr. Zhivago is illustrative of this point, constantly changing rules on who’s in and out based on constantly changing criteria. I’m disappointed when I meet an adult who’s never seen it.
Afterwords, I might have asked him whose car he had to borrow for work that day. If that yielded “that’s my car” along with a quizzical look, I’d then say I ‘d never met anyone sane as him who’d put such foolishness on their bumper. Making him the exception that proves the rule.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if it was borrowed. Or the bumper stickers were applied by an idiot in the family that needed placating.
Or perhaps he is a nice person with political views I disagree with?
It is possible to be a progressive or a liberal and not be a total killjoy and mean person.
This is true. And it’s only marginally better to live in a right-wing bubble than in a left-wing one.
It’s easy to maintain good relationships with your political enemies, so long as you mind the landmines.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Wokism is a more modern variant of Leftism. Wokism is even more depressing than Leftism because it lacks the hope of the future that Leftism can inspire. Anyway, I wrote about why going to college would make a person quite depressed in an essay a few months ago near Christmastime. To summarize, Wokism focuses on what’s wrong and can’t let people feel happy for what is good. Here is an excerpt.
How could you not be depressed if you believe something like that? People need to focus on something good or they go crazy. Wokism can only focus on the bad.
Victimhood makes people unhappy and the Left has defined itself by victimhood since Marx.
Wokism and it’s partner, victimhood, is essentially 21st Century Leftism for Dummies, in that it takes a long-term tactic of the left, demonization of their political enemies, and turns it into the governing ideology. You skip any effort to try and make anything more than a superficial positive case for your progressive ideas and simply go straight to using victimhood to brand any critics as racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., as a way to avoid having to justify your position.
Old style 20th Century leftism coming out of the educational system had its own problems with justifying it’s ideas, especially as the failures of socialist and communist regimes around the world started piling up. But its supporters back then would try to obfuscate their lack of substance by filling their sentences with boatloads of $2 words in order to sound smart and confuse the readers.
You really couldn’t be a college campus progressive 40 years ago without a thesaurus somewhere nearby. The woke crowd of today just needs to know George Carlin’s seven words you can’t say on the radio and be adept at social media. Then they rely on the force of the mob to do their work, which only works because while lots of urbanites in large corporations may not totally agree with the woke mob, they’ve been suckered into thinking the cancel culture fanatics represent a far larger portion of society than it really does, and react accordingly. The current situation won’t change until those types start ignoring the woke progressives and online victimhood loses its power to ruin peoples’ lives.
It’s quite possible that THEIR teeth are fine, but not their childrens’…
My “first approximation” likely violates the CoC, so I’ll keep it to myself.
This goes hand in hand with the perpetual privilege-scolding of anyone who doesn’t feel quite as miserable.
I have to both wonder and agree with your assertion about younger and older lesbians.
It seems like so often, gay women below the age of thirty are so mad. Which is odd, especially given that it is the older gay women who actually suffered from all manner of ills. They may have been rejected by their parents, forced to keep their personal life a secret at work and could not marry. Yet they interface with the world around them pleasantly. This might have been a coping mechanism for their survival, or it might have been just personal outlook. Who knows?
It might just be that forty years ago, our society was a more hopeful place.
The younger members of the LGBT crowd might not face any such obstacles of rejection and suppression of their identity. . But they are really pissed about something. Is it that they only have Twelve Years to live? Is it their worries that sooner rather than later, Donald Trump will put them all in camps? (Trump was the first American President who was okay w/ gay marriage on the day of his Inauguration, but apparently his acceptance is a ruse.)
Anyway I don’t get it.
However the one bright light on the progressive side is that to succeed, you need only be very good at sloganeering. So when Venezuela made a Left turn a while ago, the people who ran the nation’s oil industries did not need to know a thing about the business side of it. Or its required machinery, or materials regarding engineering or engineering itself or any of it. So at least the nation’s big shots got by knowing very little at all, until the country was run into the ground. Then all the little nattering Sloganeers were exposed for who they were.