So… do you find extermination of these people is a more tolerable course of action than getting to know them?
This is a core point I’m trying to make here, and strive to make fairly often elsewhere. The “rural swathes of MAGA chuds” (keep drinking the 1%s rural vs urban division of the middle and lower classes why don’t you) are a large enough group/voting bloc that they cannot simply be ignored.
It doesn’t have to be you, but someone has to do something about this group. And I’m not coyly endorsing mass murder or sterilization here. I’m also not sitting on my ass telling others to do work I’m not doing myself.
You can resign yourself to try and just outlive them. You could just keep trying to outvote them every time, forever. Sad, but tolerable and entirely understandable, attitude.
You can come up with a large number of other ways that effectively amount to “remove their ability to vote”, most of which would be violations of human rights or elimination of human life. These are the attitudes I find reprehensible, and shockingly fucking common.
Or we could all start making concentrated efforts to start treating people with god awful views as people where some amount of them might be able to be changed. Not as subhuman mosters (the term “chud” is pretty disgusting when you get down to it), as unredeemable fools, as non-entities (wouldn’t care if they dropped dead), or at best as roadbumps to be driven over on the path towards the future.
The fact that so many people look around at their neighbors and see so many of them as just useless wastes of space is one of the most effective ways that those in power maintain that power. Keeping those lower than them squabbling among each other so they can’t effectively organize against the people on top.
I’m not going to argue for some full overthrow of the concept of capitalism, but there is clearly a hell of a lot wrong. A lot of rot up at the top. Willingly and intentionally saying “but those people are so backwards that I could never work with them” is just a disgustingly elitist concept.
Go and punch the actual nazis. Call out “nazi bar” situations. People who literally want you and yours dead? Fire at will.
But those are levels of hatred that are far rarer than people pretend they are. Most people just want to get on with their day, and a lot of people against certain groups fold very quickly when someone they love turns out say, homosexual. That’s not hypocrisy. It’s an opportunity to help someone reflect on their biases. We all have them, stop putting yourself up on such a pedestal.
I’ve rambled enough, but I’ll throw this in as a bonus:
The “rural flyover states” have been done so fucking bad by the federal government, by their local politicians, and by corporations for so fucking long that I can’t help but see punching down every time someone starts in on the bullshit about “those stupid people out in rural areas”. They deal with a lot of similar issues to poor urban areas, and the attitude of the entire fucking world in calling impovershed areas “the global south” should give us all pause, especially when these areas of the US are in no way limited to the former confederate states.
I was born in one of those states. My wife is from one of those counties in a larger state. We’re both happy as hell to be out, but seeing what goes on there on a regular basis is terrible.
People talk about tent cities and rising amounts of homeless in major cities. No one talks about the towns that have had every industry pull out over the last 50 years and the homeless and drug abuse problems in them that are only exacerbated by there being literally no homeless shelters or clinics for 30 miles with almost entirely barren highway in between the few pockets of dying towns.
So… do you find extermination of these people is a more tolerable course of action than getting to know them?
This is a core point I’m trying to make here, and strive to make fairly often elsewhere. The “rural swathes of MAGA chuds” (keep drinking the 1%s rural vs urban division of the middle and lower classes why don’t you) are a large enough group/voting bloc that they cannot simply be ignored.
It doesn’t have to be you, but someone has to do something about this group. And I’m not coyly endorsing mass murder or sterilization here. I’m also not sitting on my ass telling others to do work I’m not doing myself.
You can resign yourself to try and just outlive them. You could just keep trying to outvote them every time, forever. Sad, but tolerable and entirely understandable, attitude.
You can come up with a large number of other ways that effectively amount to “remove their ability to vote”, most of which would be violations of human rights or elimination of human life. These are the attitudes I find reprehensible, and shockingly fucking common.
Or we could all start making concentrated efforts to start treating people with god awful views as people where some amount of them might be able to be changed. Not as subhuman mosters (the term “chud” is pretty disgusting when you get down to it), as unredeemable fools, as non-entities (wouldn’t care if they dropped dead), or at best as roadbumps to be driven over on the path towards the future.
The fact that so many people look around at their neighbors and see so many of them as just useless wastes of space is one of the most effective ways that those in power maintain that power. Keeping those lower than them squabbling among each other so they can’t effectively organize against the people on top.
I’m not going to argue for some full overthrow of the concept of capitalism, but there is clearly a hell of a lot wrong. A lot of rot up at the top. Willingly and intentionally saying “but those people are so backwards that I could never work with them” is just a disgustingly elitist concept.
Go and punch the actual nazis. Call out “nazi bar” situations. People who literally want you and yours dead? Fire at will.
But those are levels of hatred that are far rarer than people pretend they are. Most people just want to get on with their day, and a lot of people against certain groups fold very quickly when someone they love turns out say, homosexual. That’s not hypocrisy. It’s an opportunity to help someone reflect on their biases. We all have them, stop putting yourself up on such a pedestal.
I’ve rambled enough, but I’ll throw this in as a bonus:
The “rural flyover states” have been done so fucking bad by the federal government, by their local politicians, and by corporations for so fucking long that I can’t help but see punching down every time someone starts in on the bullshit about “those stupid people out in rural areas”. They deal with a lot of similar issues to poor urban areas, and the attitude of the entire fucking world in calling impovershed areas “the global south” should give us all pause, especially when these areas of the US are in no way limited to the former confederate states.
I was born in one of those states. My wife is from one of those counties in a larger state. We’re both happy as hell to be out, but seeing what goes on there on a regular basis is terrible.
People talk about tent cities and rising amounts of homeless in major cities. No one talks about the towns that have had every industry pull out over the last 50 years and the homeless and drug abuse problems in them that are only exacerbated by there being literally no homeless shelters or clinics for 30 miles with almost entirely barren highway in between the few pockets of dying towns.