Why are US rightwingers so angry? Because they know social change is coming
While their fear and dismay is often regarded as rooted in delusion, rightwingers are correct that the world is metamorphosing into something new and, to them, abhorrent. Theyre likewise correct that what version of history we tell matters. The history we tell today lays the groundwork for the future we make. The outrage over the 1619 Project and the new laws trying to censor public school teachers from telling the full story of American history are a doomed attempt to hold back facts and perspectives that are already widespread.
In 2018, halfway through the Trump presidency, Michelle Alexander wrote a powerful essay arguing that we are not the resistance. We, she declared, are the mighty river they are trying to dam. I see it flowing, and I see the tributaries that pour into it and swell its power, and I see that once firmly grounded statues and assumptions have become flotsam in its current. Similar shifts are happening far beyond the United States, but it is this turbulent nation of so much creation and destruction I know best and will speak of here.
When a regime falls, the new one sweeps away its monuments and erects its own. This is happening as the taking down of Confederate, Columbus and other statues commemorating oppressors across the country, the renaming of streets and buildings and other public places, the appearance of myriad statues and murals of Harriet Tubman and other liberators, the opening of the Legacy Museum documenting slavery and mass incarceration and housing a lynching memorial.
There was no great moment of overthrow, but nevertheless we are dismantling the trophies of the ugly old world of sanctified inequality and erecting monuments to heroes of justice and liberation, from the Olympic track medalists of 1968 making their Black power gesture at San Jose State University to the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland. All those angry white men with the tiki torches chanting, in Charlottesville in 2017, You will not replace us as they sought to defend a statue of Gen Robert E Lee were wrong in their values and actions but perhaps not in their assessment.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/20/rightwingers-us-social-change-coming
Biophilic
(3,704 posts)and they are scared and angry.
Bernardo de La Paz
(49,047 posts)Botany
(70,606 posts)Botany
(70,606 posts)Guy to the right in the 2 tone blues shirt, the bearded guy, and the really big black guy too.
jaxexpat
(6,860 posts)For instance, how closely associated is the (timely?) phenomenon of renaming many city streets, "Martin Luther King Boulevard", to the Pavlovian resonance of R. Reagan's message with "blue" collar America?
C Moon
(12,221 posts)Bev54
(10,075 posts)and I think back 20 years ago he refused to use a computer and swore he would never own a cell phone (he is now 74). I told him at the time he could do what he likes, but to not expect the world to slow down because he doesn't like it, progress will happen with or without him. Today he has a cell phone and a computer which he now uses to spew his garbage all over FB. They are forced by the rest of us to tag along, although it is screaming and complaining all the way. As long as they have their buddies who think like them, they will continue to fight it.
SouthBayDem
(32,064 posts)I remember that study saying Watching Only Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News At All.