The perfect activist/liberal/leftist/SJW snowflake commie b*stard
+ once again it's all about community!
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the demands put on writers on the left that writers on the right never face. This idea of ethical purity in a capitalist world (or ‘credit in a straight world’ if you will) is often on my mind.
I understand the desire to be morally clean. I certainly aspire to be able to look my children in the eye and say ‘I did what I could’.
I am also someone who regularly beats myself up about not doing enough. I am tempted by the same capitalist lures as anyone else and I desire the same conveniences others have (I mean how nice would it be to feel unchallenged every day). But the shoes we walk in are shaped by the roads we’ve had to navigate. And bullying myself for the things I cannot change about who I am won’t help me - and more importantly it won’t help the people I care about.
As much as we think it’s possible to be free of any ethical wrongdoing, it simply isn’t. And the pursuit of such a goal is a losing game. It’s also so hard. And we are already trying to live in a world that is increasingly hard to live in if you care about other human beings.
The trope of ‘The Left eating The Left’ has always annoyed me. It’s always delivered in such a smug way - even if there’s a little bit of truth in it. I mean, I do think that lefties can be particularly hard on their fellow lefties.
Leftism as an ideology should be based on the simple premise of trying to do better by each other - addressing inequality, breaking down class and social hierarchies that harm people, community and cooperation etc. We all have different ways of working toward these things. We are all imperfect human beings being imperfect human beings, so we are going to mess up and that’s scary.
But by always trying to think about the needs of others, we can become stuck in a cycle of fearing we’ll upset someone. And that only benefits those who don’t care about others. They have no such crisis of confidence over their actions.
I’m not going to waffle - I mean, you know me, I am going to. I always waffle. But here’s why I have been thinking about this. Today, I felt buoyed by my community then immediately tried to extinguish that joy I felt in service - to prepare for inevitable criticism.
