The political has largely been supplanted by the personal over time, and the poly is (mostly) new. I don't write many political posts anymore because people don't tend to read them. However, every once in a while something comes along that I feel compelled to write about, and here it is.
Ryan Hudson, a former Marine and now former Michigan firefighter, was, ahem, fired because of a Facebook post.
On Facebook, Hudson and a woman named Tarvenia got into a heated conversation about race. Tarvenia told Hudson that 'Black Lives Matter'. And Hudson had this to say in response:
I find this darkly amusing, actually, and I'll tell you why. I've run across two common ways to frame "Black Lives Matter". And one of them involves firefighting.
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Officially, Hudson was fired because he couldn't be trusted to do his job. Would he save a black person in a fire? That may sound like hyperbole to you, but people who held views just like Hudson's burned black people alive for sport. Read any history text on the Southern U.S. in the 1950s and 60s, or even something fictional like Greg Iles' Natchez Burning trilogy (a hell of a read, that one) and the matter-of fact, casual, brutal and blatant racism will shock you. Even if you know people were racist back then, having your face shoved in just how racist is sobering, to say the least.
That racism, I probably need not remind you, has not gone away. Witness the apoplectic reaction to "Black Lives Matter", which is INCLUSIVE, not EXCLUSIVE. Nobody who says "Black Lives Matter" is suggesting that somehow White Lives Don't Matter. Everybody knows White Lives Matter. They always have mattered more than anyone else's. That's called white privilege, and if you don't think it exists, Google "criming while white". Or, alternatively, ask yourself whether Obama would have been elected in 2008 if he had borne children by three different women and went around bragging about grabbing them by the pussy.
Hudson is only the latest in a long line of people who have been fired for expressing hateful views, or what certain individuals on the rightward end of the spectrum (and the redward end of the necktrum) insist is exercising their right to free speech. (More on this foolishness later.) Before him, Pamela Ramsey Taylor, a director of a West Virginia nonprofit, was suspended after using social media to call First Lady Michelle Obama "an ape in heels". Taylor now has her job back, apparently because West Virginia.
There have been many other people who have been fired and/or suffered serious consequences because of hateful stupidity on social media. Here are some famous cases; and here are some Canadian incidents. Let's talk about "free speech" for a moment here, because many people seem to have this idea that it means they can say whatever they want without consequence. It means no such thing, and never did.
In the United States, there are a large number of restrictions written into the First Amendment. There are differences both subtle and profound in Canadian jurisprudence. But in both countries, your speech is only deemed free from government consequence. Private entities can choose to assert their own consquences for your utterances. So can society at large. I choose not to associate with bigots, misogynists, and homophobes, for example.
As I wrote above, there once was a time when respected figures of society - judges, doctors, police officers -- routinely beat up, raped, even murdered black people for fun, and openly bragged about it. In other words, the goalposts have moved... a lot. Sixty years ago, being black (or gay, or trans, or, or, or...) was the problem. Now, hating blacks (or gays, or trans people, or, or, or...) is the problem. And people lamenting the loss of their free speech are really just pissed that somebody moved their goalposts.
I used to unthinkingly say a variant of #AllLivesMatter. Violence against anyone -- man, woman, child, animal -- has always really bothered me, and I used to think that anti-violence-against-women campaigns were well-meaning but narrowminded: we should be against all violence, I would commonly argue.
And maybe we should, but as "mutilated memories" says:
Men get sexually assaulted, men get abused, men have toxic gender stereotypes that they are expected to live up to. This is a problem, and I am more than willing to have discussions about this, and talk about what can/should be done to change these things etc, if you bring it up as its own topic. HOWEVER, if you bring these things up as an attempt to override discussions about women, I will not listen to you. If you really cared about men’s issues you’d bring it up at other times, not only when we’re discussing women. That’s not you caring about men’s issues, that’s you not wanting to talk about women’s issues because you want everything to be about men.
I often hear those same Rob Ford/Stephen Harper/Donald Trump supporters disparaging how "complicated" all this is. It's not complicated.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS NOT COMPLICATED AT ALL.
I've posted this before, and find I must again:
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