Mostly agree here, Will, but I think you miss one thing (that maybe you plan to get to in the next installment. I'm not the most woke guy around, having been born in the late 50s in the South, but I was called PC and ultra-sensitive when I criticized a neighbor on our local subdivision's Facebook group a few months ago who was using the …
Mostly agree here, Will, but I think you miss one thing (that maybe you plan to get to in the next installment. I'm not the most woke guy around, having been born in the late 50s in the South, but I was called PC and ultra-sensitive when I criticized a neighbor on our local subdivision's Facebook group a few months ago who was using the following image as his avatar: https://www.ballisticink.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Ballistic_Ink_IV8888_Man_Can_2020_01_Mens_Tshirt_Black_CloseUp.jpg . I said it was rude and provocative. (This was well before Jan. 6.) You can imagine his reaction (an army vet and firefighter). The thing is, he was assuming it was fine to have that as his avatar, because everybody knew him, and he was a good guy, helpful to neighbors, etc. When I was growing up, in the 60s and 70s, those would have been the things that mattered to "everybody," because "everybody" was white, suburban, middle class, and if your neighbor was in the John Birch Society he probably kept it to himself. When you write, "our progress is measurably eroding and we’re getting measurably less free," someone my age who grew up Black on the other side of my hometown would probably disagree with you. The difference is, today he or she has somewhere to say it--social media--where they didn't fifty years ago. So today, when somebody uses an offensive avatar on Facebook, he gets called on it by people who would have clammed up in earlier decades. The freedom you speak of was not available to them, back then. Their voices are in the mix now, and attitudes that presume privilege get challenged. What the people who miss pre-woke culture really miss is the sense that they're talking to their tribe. It used to be that their tribe was the only one that got to talk. Not so now, and we all have to either adjust the way we speak in public in a way that is false to our true feelings, or we have to expand our idea of whose tribe we belong to.
Mostly agree here, Will, but I think you miss one thing (that maybe you plan to get to in the next installment. I'm not the most woke guy around, having been born in the late 50s in the South, but I was called PC and ultra-sensitive when I criticized a neighbor on our local subdivision's Facebook group a few months ago who was using the following image as his avatar: https://www.ballisticink.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Ballistic_Ink_IV8888_Man_Can_2020_01_Mens_Tshirt_Black_CloseUp.jpg . I said it was rude and provocative. (This was well before Jan. 6.) You can imagine his reaction (an army vet and firefighter). The thing is, he was assuming it was fine to have that as his avatar, because everybody knew him, and he was a good guy, helpful to neighbors, etc. When I was growing up, in the 60s and 70s, those would have been the things that mattered to "everybody," because "everybody" was white, suburban, middle class, and if your neighbor was in the John Birch Society he probably kept it to himself. When you write, "our progress is measurably eroding and we’re getting measurably less free," someone my age who grew up Black on the other side of my hometown would probably disagree with you. The difference is, today he or she has somewhere to say it--social media--where they didn't fifty years ago. So today, when somebody uses an offensive avatar on Facebook, he gets called on it by people who would have clammed up in earlier decades. The freedom you speak of was not available to them, back then. Their voices are in the mix now, and attitudes that presume privilege get challenged. What the people who miss pre-woke culture really miss is the sense that they're talking to their tribe. It used to be that their tribe was the only one that got to talk. Not so now, and we all have to either adjust the way we speak in public in a way that is false to our true feelings, or we have to expand our idea of whose tribe we belong to.