The Future is Local: They/Them Month
It’s all “Their” fault!
June has become a month of “they.” They want drag shows for kids. They want to turn America into The Handmaid’s Tale. They want to kill gays. They want everybody to BE gay. “They” want a lot of stuff, it seems like. What do all these contradictory accusations have in common? They all put responsibility for your outrage on a group of people. On a label.
Conveniently, you never really need to define individuals within that group. So June turns into everybody hating what “they” are doing or saying this month, with no real sense that there are real individuals involved. This is endemic in social/political discourse now. And it’s pointless, because it’s arguing about the symptoms of a problem instead of the real problem.
The real problem is this:
In a free society, it wouldn’t matter what “they” think about how to live life. However, the less free society gets the more it matters who thinks what, because whoever is in charge gets more and more ability to dictate life rules to everybody else. Believe what you like. Just don’t force it on your neighbors. FORCE is what people need to be focusing on, and guarding against.
Don’t believe me? You know what else happens in June? School lets out. Why were kids in school for eight or nine months? Because they were FORCED to be. School has been declared “good” and therefore has been made mandatory. How is that working out?
No matter how many people think an idea is good, forcing everyone else to pretend to agree leads inevitably to terrible outcomes. What fixes it? Stop trying to force people to live their lives your way. Whatever it is you think June ought to be about, don’t force it on everybody else.
You don’t need to force children to go to government schools. You just don’t. You don’t need to force other people’s children to listen to you talk about sex. You just don’t. You don’t need to force other people to live life your way. You just don’t. Making it illegal to disagree with you is always wrong. If a thing is good, people will see that it is good and do it, with no compulsion needed. That means, though, that you are going to need to convince people (real individual people, one by one) that your way is a good way, not compel “them” to agree no matter how they truly feel. It’s true for school. It’s true for everything. Especially in June.
I may think you’re weird. I may not understand you. I may not even want to understand you. But it’s not for me to make you live my way. Let’s all treat each other with that courtesy.