The Damage Done By Those Who Say “Stop Acting Like a Victim-WE’RE THE REAL VICTIMS HERE!”
There are a lot of people who have been wounded by life and history in this country- BIPOC people, the poor, many if not most cis-women, LGBTQ people, workers of all races, Muslims, Jews, people of other faiths and people who are athiests or agnostics- and it is entirely legitimate for those groups of people- most of whom also show amazing resilience simply by getting out of bed every morning and going on with life, in a country and under a system that seems bound and determined to humiliate and subjugate them on a continual basis- to call for the injustices they’ve experienced and continue to experience to finally be addressed.
And there is one group of people who continually refuse to accept that people in the above groups- groups which, between them, make up the majority of the American people and of the human race- have any right to discuss the wounds and the wrongs inflicted on them:
Right-wing white men- the group that has done and continue to do more to victimize others than anyone else in this country and this world.
These men are obsessed with mocking, discrediting and silencing anyone outside their group who have experiencing any levels of injustice and injury. They insist that nobody else’s pain, nobody else’s wrongs, nobody else’s wounds can possibly be valid.
At the same time that they do this, these men insist that they, and they ALONE, have suffered. They act as if they and they alone have had to work hard, sacrifice, pay taxes, fight this country’s wars.
They insist that any wrongs they may have experienced were caused NOT by those who probably actually caused it- the corporations who deprived them of gainful employment in rounds of massive and arbitrary layoffs, the financial institution that foreclosed on their homes, the politicians who blocked the “public option” on the Affordable Care Act that would have effectively created single-payer healthcare and guaranteed that no healthcare crisis would have put them into financial ruin.
Instead, these bitter, self-pitying, misdirected men focused their rage and bitterness on people who had done nothing to deserve any anger from them:
The people of color who simply want the police to stop automatically treating them worse than they treat white people in identical or similar situations, or who just want to be able to move into any neighborhood they can afford to move into without their new neighbors treating them like they have no right to be there;
The LGBTQ people who are guilty of nothing but ceasing to live a lie and hide themselves in a way no one else is expected to do, none of which could have any possible affect on the lives of these men; the cis-women guilty of nothing but beating them out for a job those cis-women had as much right to apply for and who have just as much reason to be in the workforce, since no family can make it on a single paycheck anymore and since in many cases there is no alternative but for those cis-women to be working to support their families;
The immigrants who have as much right to come here as any previous generation of immigrants from anywhere else, who contribute much more in taxes and hard work than they could ever take away from this country;
The growing number of Americans who hold to faiths other than Christianity, or to the guidance of their own consciences- people who are just as American as anyone who does identify as Christian, since there was never any Constitutional or other historic guarantee that this country was reserved for white Christians and no one else, and especially since many of the drafters of the Constitution were, in fact Deists or freethinkers;
And, most recently, the 81 million people- all of whose votes were just as legal and legitimate as anyone else’s- who just voted to oust the president these right-wing white men seem to believe should be president-for-life whether the people wanted him to stay in office or not.
This relentless denial of the real suffering and injustice tens of million of people have experienced, combined by an insistence that those doing the denying are the only true sufferers and that those whose actual pain these people have belittled and dismissed are somehow to blame for everything the right-wing white men see as an injustice in their lives is poisoning this country.
It poisons our shared national existence, by perpetrating the illusion that any discussion of injustice is a scam or a “hoax”, designed solely to steal something from someone;
It poisons those who are targeted by unjustified right wing white male derision;
It poisons, in the end, those right wing white men who inflict it- because it clouds their minds, suppresses their capacity for critical thinking, common humanity, and creating coalitions that would change the actual causes of their pain- the arrogance of corporate capitalism- and, quite simply, by both exaggerating the real wounds some of those men have received from life and making it impossible for those men ever to do what they need to do to find healing: actually address their emotional realities and their own wounds- and, at its worst, transforms the preservation of perceived suffering into a kind of addiction.
If we are to go forward as a country, if we are to get to anything close to a decent and non-insurrectionist political discourse in this country, the canard that the only people who have suffered or have any legitimate grievances are right wing white men must be brought to an end, must be put to rest.
And if these right-wing white men are ever to heal and find a decent, meaningful life, they must stop repeating this canard. It solves none of their problems, it gives them no path forward, it leaves them with nothing resembling hope. And without hope, what is there to live FOR?
