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Wanted: More Safe Spaces
We need more safe spaces. No, not the sterile little cubbies that the snowflakes need to avoid being “triggered,” to avoid facing an unpleasant idea or a challenging thought; we have enough of those already. We call those spaces “universities,” and the country is littered with them. No, we need more places where normal Americans can hear and say what they believe without fear of being fired, of their children being ostracized, of their grades being ruined, and of their families being torn apart.
I’ve lived in a lot of America: Kansas City, Denver, Albuquerque, Memphis, Sarasota, Cleveland, Austin, Tucson, rural Missouri, and rural New York. I’ve lived in urban high-rise apartments and on rolling farms, owned homes in lush Florida suburbs and dusty New Mexico river valleys. I’ve met a few people who think America is a racist hellhole full of injustice and oppression, but vastly more who go to church and go to work and make sense and raise their kids and maybe believe too much of what they see on the evening news. Americans aren’t by and large a “woke” people. We’re a gloriously apolitical bunch, a nation of sensible and pragmatic and decent citizens busy making ends meet in an often challenging economy.
Most Americans don’t know the nonsense being spread like manure in our schools and universities. The don’t appreciate just how deeply the lies of wokeness have infected our culture: the lie that America is a racist country, the lie that BLM is other than a corrupt racket built on a myth of systemic police racism, the lie that Antifa isn’t in fact the fascism it pretends to oppose; the lie that climate change threatens us with imminent disaster, the lies that men and women are the same, that sex is malleable, that the gender dysphoric aren’t suffering from emotional disorders.
Those Americans who are aware of this cultural sickness are often afraid to speak, because they understand that there are often real consequences to speaking out against the cultural rot. People get fired, students get expelled, lives get ruined: cancel culture is real, and it increasingly targets normal people living normal lives who happen to voice an unapproved opinion.
We need safe spaces, places where people can say and hear opinions that don’t comport with the narrative. Ricochet is such a space, particularly for those who maintain their anonymity here. We should encourage those who are afraid to speak out, who fear the very real potential consequences of speaking against the woke mob, to join us here.
Even more importantly, those of us who feel safe speaking out should do so, often and loudly. There’s safety in numbers, and as more of us counter the narrative others will feel more free to join in. It is incumbent on those of us who can speak without danger to our livelihoods or to the security of those we love to do so every opportunity we get, and on every forum available to us.
Published in Culture
It’s early. But FDR was pretty incredibly transformative. I hope we don’t reach that point.
Show a little respect. That was The Big Bus.
Actually, I know. I remember it pretty well from when I saw it in the theater. The teenage me thought it was pretty clever.
I just didn’t want to admit that I could still name the movie and repeat several of the jokes.
But of course, Monty Python did the best with cannibalism:
What a world!
“Expedition To Lake Pahoe” is good too, but I couldn’t find a video clip online.