“The emails in question were, 1. Not from Hilary 2. Not from her server. 3. Not from her investigation.”Trump is facing multiple sexual assault allegations, with a trial on charges of child rape scheduled for December, and just this weekend he specifically urged his supporters to vote multiple times (in violation of law) after spending weeks claiming the system was rigged, and has urged his supporters to commit voter intimidation. But what is everyone talking about? A vague, misleading, and possibly illegal statement by the FBI director about emails supposedly related to the previous email investigate which found no evidence of illegal activity. Emails that no one has actually looked at. Emails that they haven’t even gotten a warrant to look at, yet. Emails that to the best of our knowledge aren’t from Hilary at all. It’s just that a computer owned by the husband of a staff member may have also been used by the staff member to access email accounts which might have been related to her past job on Hilary’s staff.
Face the Nation did a segment this weekend where they interviewed some Trump supporters and it was… special: Trump supporter tells CBS: He will make America great again like it was before ‘the homosexuals’. We’ll come back to the bit that made it into the headline. I’m just continually confused by people like these (and a whole bunch of my rightwing relatives), who keep insisting that Trump is the Christian candidate. Insisting that Trump is going to lead the country to a place of morality (with the corollary claim that the country is deeply immoral now).
I just don’t quite understand how anyone can make a statement with a straight face, as the woman in the Face the Nation video does, about a time “before abortions and the homosexuals.”
Humans have been performing abortions since ancient times. There’s a section of the old testament (that gets mistranslated rather hilariously), which instructs husbands who believe their pregnant wives have been unfaithful to take the women to the temple so that the rabbis can abort the baby, for instance. Abortion was happening in the U.S. at an alarming rate in the 1950s and 1960s when it was illegal, for instance: 200,000 to 1.2 million per year, resulting in as many as 5,000 American women dying annually as a direct result of unsafe abortions.
And queer people have been around for as long as there have been people. And humans are not the only species on the planet with queer members.
What she and people like her really mean, of course, is not a time before queer people existed, but a time when queer people weren’t treated as human. When we could be fired, thrown in jail, and so on just because of who we loved. When there were arcane laws that made it illegal for a bartender to knowingly serve alcohol to more than one homosexual (yes, the laws actually said it was okay to have one fag in your bar at a time, but no more!).
But it wasn’t just that queers were beaten to death with impunity and subject to jail time and fines for who they loved. In many states and towns it was literally illegal for women to wear pants in public or for men to wear a dress (one of those laws in a town in New Jersey wasn’t overturned until 2014, by the way!). And the laws were usually pretty vague. It was a crime to appear “in public a clothing not belonging to his or her sex.” Which makes me wonder about the sort of suit jacket thing the woman in that video is wearing, no?
Remember it was also illegal in most states for a woman to refuse sex to her husband until such laws began to be repealed in the 1970s. Note: even if a couple were in the midst of a divorce, legally separated, and the husband broke into the home the wife was staying in and forced himself on her, she couldn’t charge him with rape. Heck, under current law some states there has to be proof of physical violence of an aggravated level before it can be called rape.
And it was a time when it was illegal in many places for people of different races to marry.
And these things are all related. There are reasons that abortion rulings were referenced in early court cases about sodomy laws. Ultimately, laws about abortion, homosexuality, marriage, and even how people dress are all about making sure that some people’s bodies (women, racial minorities, religious minorities, sexual minorities) are under the control of other people (white Anglo Saxon Protestant men). In that time before The Homosexuals, America was not a place where woman could dress as they wished, where woman could kiss or refuse to kiss who they wished, or where anyone outside of very narrow definitions or situations could love or get intimate with another consenting adult.
It wasn’t a better time for anyone who wasn’t a straight, cisgender, white guy… or a person considered under their protection (control).
How the 2012 election went by county (source: Mark Newman / University of Michigan). It looks as if Romney should have won, until you realize that more the 60 percent of the population of the entire country lives in those tiny blue areas.I read a few stories yesterday, long after my weekly Friday Links post went up, which I was thinking about for a Weekend Update post, which has also become almost a weekly tradition here. But then this morning, while I was trying to get awake enough to check my blood sugar and take my morning meds, I saw an old friend had retweeted: “Probably the very best thing to read to understand Trump’s popularity, is this Cracked (!) piece. Amazing:” How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind. The article is amazing.
If I had seen this article (which Cracked published on Wednesday) earlier, it would have been the link of the week, no question. I’ve written previously on this blog about several of the things that David Wong, the author of the piece, pulls together, but all of the pieces of the puzzle hadn’t quite come into focus for me in this way before. There are a couple of teeny quibbles I have with the article. He lumps the suburbs in with cities in most of the article, for instance, while one of his few citations of statistics (that 62% of the population lives in the cities) ignores that fact that cities plus suburbs actually add up to 80% of the country’s population.
But all of them really are just quibbles.
For me, the most frustrating part of the perception gap he describes has been trying to bite my tongue as people I love—in some cases the very people who taught me to love my neighbors and try to understand other people—aren’t just voting for Trump, but they are absolutely convinced that voting for him is the most Christian and reasonable thing to do. Sometimes in the same breath that they say they are so, so sorry that my queer self and my husband didn’t drive a couple hundred miles to attend their Independence Day barbecue, they talk about how marriage equality and letting trans people use public restrooms are literally causing an Apocalypse.
And they really don’t understand why I don’t feel safe in their community!
Don’t message me saying all those things I listed are wrong. I know they’re wrong. Or rather, I think they’re wrong, because I now live in a blue county and work for a blue industry. I know the Good Old Days of the past were built on slavery and segregation, I know that entire categories of humanity experienced religion only as a boot on their neck. I know that those “traditional families” involved millions of women trapped in kitchens and bad marriages. I know gays lived in fear and abortions were back-alley affairs.
I know the changes were for the best.
Try telling that to anybody who lives in Trump country.
I have tried to explain that the Good Old Days were only good for some people. I have tried to explain that Black Lives Matter is not a movement bent on killing white cops. I have tried to explain that the rate of violent crime is actually lower here in the city than where they live. I have tried to explain that gender inequality is real. I have tried to explain that gay bashing isn’t something that only lunatics do, but something they are themselves doing verbally to me all the time.
And they can’t hear it. They can’t see it.
They blame Obama for their economic troubles because things got really bad after the 2008 Great Recession started. They don’t care that it started while Bush was president, to them the hurt came after Obama was elected, so it’s obviously his fault. They also believe it’s all his fault because of all the insane, often racially-motivated misinformation they receive from the only news sources they think they can trust. They honestly don’t believe that any of the facts they are relying on are actually racist distortions, so they get very angry when we characterize a lot of the blatantly racist memes that they regurgitate as bigoted.
Even putting the pieces together the way Wong does, however, I couldn’t understand how in the case of my specific relatives, they don’t experience pain from the cognitive dissonance of telling me how much they love Michael and I—specifically that they realize we are truly meant to be together—but they also think that the Supreme Court ruling making our marriage legal throughout the land is a literal attack out of hell?
I guess, using Wong’s analogies, they see us as the cute supporting characters among the elites of the Capitol City in the Hunger Games? We’re sympathetic and they will shed a tear over our corpses when the revolution comes, but they have every intention of storming the city, hurling the bricks and firing whatever weapons they have, because it’s the only way to save their way of life?
Then, as I was writing the paragraphs above and re-reading Wong’s article, I had an epiphany. Wong does a good job of using the imagery and cultural shorthand of The Hunger Games, but I think he missed another important touchstone. I saw it the third time I read this bit:
In a city, you can plausibly aspire to start a band, or become an actor, or get a medical degree. You can actually have dreams. In a small town, there may be no venues for performing arts aside from country music bars and churches. There may only be two doctors in town — aspiring to that job means waiting for one of them to retire or die. You open the classifieds and all of the job listings will be for fast food or convenience stores. The “downtown” is just the corpses of mom and pop stores left shattered in Walmart’s blast crater, the “suburbs” are trailer parks. There are parts of these towns that look post-apocalyptic.
I’m telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive.
Downtown is just the corpses of mom and pop stores… just the corpses of mom and pop…
Economically, to them, the world as become The Walking Dead.
Everywhere they look they see the shambling, murderous horde searching for more living flesh to consume. We, the liberal elite city dwellers with our city jobs and smart phones and environmentally friendly cars (if we haven’t already gone carless), are already infected. Maybe we don’t look like walking corpses, yet, but they know what we’re going to turn into eventually. They don’t like what’s going to happen to us, but they fear even more it happening to them, and to their children who haven’t already been infected.
The New York Times article tries to sell us a sob story about those evangelical Christians who have run afoul of anti-discrimination laws or otherwise been called out for their bigoted behavior. The NYT wants the reader to feel sorry for these people who just want the right to discriminate against gay people, and who wish that it was still illegal for gay people to be openly gay, and so forth. America has changed so quickly, they lament! Why, oh why does no one understand their pain?
On Dara’s blog a NALT1 Christian chimed in being all offended at being compared to Nazis. He claimed that he didn’t know any Christians who were pushing an anti-gay agenda, or certainly that there aren’t any now. Maybe decades ago, sure, but not now.
First, the self-identified Christians quoted in the NYT article are actively pushing an anti-gay agenda right now. That’s how they got into the situation they are in.
Second, more than one of those folks claiming to be Christian who are quoted in the article, explicitly and implicitly say more than once that people who aren’t anti-gay aren’t Christian. And they are hardly the first to do so.
Third, every business that has run afoul of anti-discrimination laws by denying service or otherwise discriminating against queer people have been defended by lawyers from the Liberty Counsel, an explicitly Christian non-profit organization that includes multiple references to their Christian affiliation in every public statement. In fact, every single anti-gay initiative, referendum, or law that has been pushed in the last three decades, has been championed by Christian organizations such as the Liberty Council, the Family Research Council, the National Organization for Marriage, the Catholic League, Abiding Truth Ministries, the American Family Association, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, the Concerned Women for America, Coral Ridge Ministries, the Traditional Values Coalition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera2. And every politician who has defended anti-trans/anti-gay/anti-lesbian laws and policies has made references to their sincerely held Christian beliefs as the reason why they are pushing the anti-queer policies.
It is simply not plausible that anyone paying any attention whatsoever to the controversies over marriage equality, trans bathroom bills, anti-bullying campaigns in schools, so-called conversion therapy, and so forth to not have noticed all the scripture quoting, Bible thumping, and God invoking that has been done to justify the anti-queer actions. So, I call BS on the guy trying to claim that he has no knowledge of any reason us queers would feel targeted by Christians.
Fourth, every queer person I know over the age of 30 has had at least one bad experience being bullied, harassed, bashed, or otherwise mistreated by someone doing it in the name of Christ. Each and every one of us. That’s a whole lot of coincidences, if you’re going to insist that’s all it is.
So, yes, I am well aware that not all Christians are like that, but some are. And it isn’t just a few. It isn’t queer people like me giving Christianity a bad name, it’s self-proclaimed Christians like Mike Huckabee, Scott Lively, Gov. Pat McCrory, Judge Roy Moore, Rev. Franklin Graham, Glenn Beck, Ted Cruz, Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, Joel Osteen, Congressman Rick W. Allen, and so on. And it’s the tens of thousands of self-proclaimed Christian voters who support anti-gay politicians like Roy Moore, Pat McRory, and Rick Allen. It’s the millions of self-proclaimed Christian voters who selected delegates to the Republican National Convention which this year passed literally the most viciously anti-queer political party platform ever in the history of the U.S.
If you don’t like being called a bigot3, stop acting like one. And stop scolding people who accurately point out bigoted actions when we see them. And stop defending bigots when they claim that they’re the victims because sometimes they get pushback when they say and do bigoted things. And stop writing whiny articles about the terrible predicament of bigots who aren’t allowed to practice their bigotry with utter impunity any longer.
Footnotes:
1. NALT = Not All Like That. People who decide to scold queer people any time we talk about being mistreated, discriminated against, or bashed by other folks claiming to be Christian. Usually they try to imply that we’re giving Christians a bad name, and we shouldn’t do that. They don’t take too kindly to it when we point out that we’re not the one’s ruining Christianity’s reputation, it’s their co-religionists. Nor do they ever seem brave enough to take the advice that if they want the world to stop equating bigotry with Christianity, then they should be scolding the bigoted Christians.
2. If you want to know more about these groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center has nice historical write-ups about these and other hate groups.
3. And stop trying to claim that being called a bigot is the equivalent of passing laws to criminalize our relationships, to allow us to be fired for who we love, et cetera.
So the poor boy nearly bled to death, and has suffered brain damage (and mostly likely several other organs as well) due to the lack of oxygen because of the lack of blood. He was reportedly clinically dead twice, but was revived both times.
Reading these stories is really difficult. I am reminded of Mr. Rogers’ famous advice when reading or seeing tragic news: look for the helpers. We have at least two heroes in this story: Jamie Brock, a volunteer firefighter who tackled to the teen shooter and held him until police got there, and Meghan Hollingsworth, the first-grade teacher who was shot and when the volunteer firefighters arrived, refused treatment until the two children had been seen to.
It’s a sad story all around. The 14-year-old shooter had been expelled or suspended (depending on which news story you read) from public school at some point earlier for bringing a weapon to school and has since been homeschooled. The day of the shooting, the teen apparently shot and killed his father, called his grandmother but was crying too hard to be understood, then jumped into a pickup truck and drove three miles before crashing at the elementary school and opening fire. We don’t know if he intended to go to that school, since he didn’t have a driver’s license and may not have had good control of the car. We don’t know why he killed his father. Was there an argument, or was it something even more stupid? And so on.
Which makes it not unlike the shooting that happened here in Washington state last week. No motive has yet been uncovered, and going by news headlines, all the media cares about is that the initial reports that he was a permanent resident alien were incorrect, he had actually completed the naturalization process a while ago. But that hasn’t stopped our incompetent state Secretary of State from proposing draconion voter ID regulations using the shooter as an excuse.
Seriously, why he killed five strangers in less than 60 seconds is a more important question than his citizenship status.
I need some happy news after that, so here’s this: One Judge Reunites with Hundreds of Couples She Married, Helped with Adoptions. Just four years ago, after the voter-approved marriage equality law went into effect here in Washington state, Judge Mary Yu opened her courtroom at midnight to perform marriages for gay and lesbian couples on the very first day. “Let Mary Yu Marry You” was in the official announcement that the court would open that night.
Judge Yu has since been appointed to fill an unexpired term on the state Supreme Court, becoming the first openly queer state Supreme Court Justice (she’s also the first asian and the first woman of color to sit on the court). She had to win a special election in 2015 to remain on the court for the rest of the term… which ends in January, so she’s up for election again.
Anyway, the article I linked includes a lot of stories from the couples whose adoptions or marriages Yu handled during her years on the county Superior Court. Here’s just one:
“In August of 2011 Whitney [Taylor] had unexpectedly been diagnosed with a brain tumor shortly after our daughter was born,” Amy Babcock wrote. “We wanted to make sure Whitney’s second parent adoption of our daughter was finalized before her surgery to remove the tumor, so Justice Mary Yu spent her lunch break the day before Whitney’s surgery finalizing the second parent adoption for us. It was a time of fear and uncertainty for our family, but Justice Yu provided us joy and thankfulness during that time. We are forever thankful to Justice Yu for ensuring our family was protected and celebrated. In 2015, Justice Yu performed the second parent adoption of our son as well, and we were able this time to celebrate with a room full of friends and family.”
Last week I very intentionally didn’t do a Weekend Update post to supplement the previous day’s Friday Links post. I was feeling as if I was spending every Saturday morning writing about a few headlines that caught my eye later Friday. When maybe a better use of my time would be working on my fiction, or housework, or other things that actually gets something done that needs doing, y’know?
Then we got out of the movie last night, and one friend who had just turned his phone back on tells us that there was a shooting at a mall in a town about an hour’s drive north of where we were. There was almost no information available last night, and this morning there still isn’t really much: Cascade Mall shooting: Mayor vows to ‘bring the son of a bitch to justice’.
They have some really low-res blurry pictures of a generic looking dark haired guy wearing a very generic looking maybe black t-shirt and maybe black cargo shorts. They originally put out the APB for a “hispanic male wearing gray,” but if the pictures are any indication the only part of that which might be accurate is the shooter’s gender presentation.
Seriously, I know Seattle area men who come form a long line of Norwegians who look exactly like that guy. Heck! I used to know a lesbian firefighter (who was sometimes mistaken for a guy) whose ancestors came from Switzerland and England who looked just like that guy.
Some of the news sources are reporting this as the sixth mass shooting in Washington state this year. Another source said seven, and then lists them, but there are only five total in the list. Also of note only to my fellow pedants: one of the shootings they’re counting had only two victims, another had only three. The FBI still doesn’t have an official criteria for a mass shooting, but most people compiling statistics start with the FBI’s definition of mass murder (four people killed in a single incident, not counting the perpetrator), and count anything with four people shot as a mass shooting.
I don’t know what to say.
Except this (which I think needs to be repeated every time a story of some situation like this happens): unless you have the skills, temperament, and wherewithal to be a responsible gun owner (i.e., ensure that guns are always securely stored when not in use; they are kept clean and otherwise maintained; you regularly practice not merely shooting the thing but loading it, unloading it, checking its working parts before using it, working the safety; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera), don’t go buy a gun. Statistically, you will not be safer. Statistically, everyone around you will be less safe. That’s a fact.
Three months ago, an angry homophobe walked into an Orlando, Florida gay night club and murdered 49 people, wounding 53 more. It was a Saturday night during Queer Pride month, and it was specifically Latinx Night at that club. The homophobe had spent time in the days before the massacre staking out the location. He had created a fake profile on a gay hook up app before that for the express purpose (based on the recovered chats) of finding out what the busiest gay nightclubs were in his community1. It was a planned hate crime.
The homophobe decided to buy an assault rifle to kill as many queers as he could after seeing two men kissing in public. The shooter’s own father was shocked at how angry his son had become when he saw that.
Three months later, reading about this still feels like a punch in my gut. I’m an out queer man who grew up in redneck communities during the 60s and 70s. I have always had the moment of fear any time I am out in public with my husband any time we show any affection. I have a specific incident where I know my husband was threatened with violence after we exchanged a quick kiss when I dropped him off at a bus stop years ago. It’s a dread calculation I find myself making whenever we are out with friends: is it all right if I call him “honey,” or will we get harassed? Can I safely say, “I love you,” or will we get threatened?
Thanks to this shooting, there’s now a new layer of fear and anxiety on that. Not just that I and my husband might be in danger, but that our actions might set off another bigot who will go murder a bunch of queer people.
Some people will ask, “It’s been three months; are you still upset about this?” And yes, people will actually ask. I know this because the day after the massacre happened people who I used to think were my friends were angry at me for being upset about the shooting.
There’s other kinds of fall-out still happening: State slaps $150,000 fine on security firm that employed Orlando Pulse shooter. The company isn’t being fined for anything directly related to the massacre. No, while authorities (and journalists) were investigating, the psychological evaluation he had undergone to get his security job was publicized. And people tried to contact the doctor whose name was on the evaluation. The problem was, she had stopped practicing more than a decade ago, had moved out of state, and hadn’t performed any evaluations for the employer since. At least 1500 employees were incorrectly listed has having been examined by the retired doctor during those ten years.
The state agency that investigated believes that all of those people were evaluated and passed, just that the wrong doctor was listed on their records. Over a thousand times. Over the course of ten years. Isn’t that reassuring?
I mean, a single psych eval doesn’t guarantee anything, particularly one done years before. And if I’m going to be disturbed about problems in the case, it would be the shooter’s history of domestic violence. One might ask how people get jobs where they are given badges and weapons and put in charge of security at places like courthouses when they have a history of domestic violence. I’m reminded of a chilling op-ed piece I read years ago that pointed out if having been arrested for domestic violence (or admitting in divorce proceedings to abuse) disqualified people from being cops, prison guards, and the like, we’d have a very hard time staffing departments, prisons, and so forth3.
Let’s not forget that all the societal forces and institutions that encouraged the shooter to hate queer people, and that afterward blames the victims for bring this thing on themselves just by being who they are, are still active in this country. Some of them are even running for high political office. Others are merely preaching in churches around the country. Though some are finding themselves less welcome with their co-religionists: Baptist Union distances itself from anti-gay pastor.
The pastor in question, Steven Anderson, is one of many who said (from his pulpit) the Pulse massacre victims deserved to be murdered. He’s not the pastor who said that who has since been arrested for molesting a young boy. But since this guy also often goes off on homophobic rants, it wouldn’t surprise me if he gets caught doing something similar. But right now he’s just trying to go to South Africa and preach. He might not get to spread his hate there, however: SOUTH AFRICA CONSIDERS BANNING U.S. ANTI-GAY PREACHER.
But enough about the hateful people. What can we do to help love to win? Well, the first thing is not to forget the previous victims of hate:
Victims killed in Pulse in Orlando three months ago. (Click to embiggen) (Facebook/AP/Reuters/Rex)
Footnotes:
1. The political cartoon I link to above refers to the Orlando shooter as a “gay homophobe” which was widely reported, but later debunked by the FBI2. The shooter installed a gay hookup app on his phone and set up his account around the same time that he bought the weapon that he later used in the massacre. And as I mentioned, his conversations never turned into meetings. He would ask gays what the busiest club was, and if they didn’t know, stop talking to him. If they mentioned any clubs, he would ask questions about the nightclubs, and then deflect any attempts by the person he was talking to to actually meet. A few people who spoke to the press in the aftermath of the shootings, claiming to have been flirted with by him or have even had sex with the shooter. But the FBI determined that none of them had actually met the shooter.
2. I still run into people who believe that the shooter was a self-loathing gay man, and that this fact means it wasn’t actually a hate crime. First, he wasn’t gay. Second, lots of hate crimes against queer people have been committed by self-loathing or in-denial queer people. Doesn’t make it any less of a hate crime.
It’s a temporary pause, and the feds have asked the construction company to voluntarily stop. But the agencies in question have the ability to make it mandatory if necessary. Also, it’s worth noting the judge was only ruling on whether an immediate injunction was warranted. His ruling doesn’t stop the lawsuit the tribe filed against the construction companies. They may well prevail in court, yet. That’s assuming the meeting that the government agencies are convening with the tribes and other interested parties doesn’t result in another resolution to the dispute.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and Russia have brokered a cease fire in Syria: Syria Rivals Sign Up To US-Russian Peace Plan. Previous truces in this conflict haven’t held, so I don’t know how much hope people are holding out that this will lead to a resolution. But I think we have to keep trying. And we can at least hope that during the ceasefire aid is able to get to those who need it.
Meanwhile, things have turned predictably deplorable at the so-called Value Voters Summit: Gary Bauer At Hate Summit: Christians Are Like The Flight 93 Passengers Trying To Stop A Hijacking. I get it, tomorrow is the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the anti-gay, racist, misogynist, sectarian jerks have to maintain their delusion that they are under attack. They are probably sincere in their claims that any time they aren’t allowed to oppress (preferably with the full force of the law) people who believe differently than they do that they’re the ones being victimized.
“Like being a woman—like being a racial, religious, or ethnic minority—being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.”But the steady march of America toward liberty and justice for all is not a hijacking. It’s what the country has claimed to be the goal since our founding! It’s particularly irritating when the person making this tortured metaphor is also someone doing it in the name of the religion that teaches: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.”
John Oliver and the Cookie Monster presenting news on “Last Week Tonight.”The first time I did one of these weekend updates, it was because after I posted that week’s Friday Links (just before going to bed Thursday night), there had been a rather big development in one of the stories. Specifically, I’d posted at least one link about yet another planned anti-gay march being sponsored by NOM and some of the related hate groups. And that was the second year that the small number of people who showed up was significantly smaller than any previous year. The shocking development, for me, was that all of the the rightwing so-called news sites reported on the march truthfully, admitting that almost no one showed up and that support for the anti-gay cause was going away.
I didn’t intend this to become a weekly thing, but some how, at least a few times every month, something happens after I post Friday Links something turns up in my twitter timeline or on the news that I either really wish I had included, or that substantially improves upon something I did include. So, yesterday I linked to the story of Rialto, an orphaned sea otter pup found nearly dead on a beach several weeks ago, who has been nursed back to health at the Seattle Aquarium.
I’m also sorry I didn’t include any links about Taco Truck Nation, because it is a perfect example of just how weird the otherworldly perspective held by supporters of the orange-skinner white supremacist buffoon are compared to the rest of us: Trump supporter’s ‘taco trucks’ remark draws mockery. Because people with a non-racist, non-fearful, non-xenophobic viewpoint just associate taco trucks with delicious food.
Mostly I’ve ignored them. If someone I follow on social media makes a comment ridiculing one of those clickbait headlines I might re-blog it or click “Like.” I don’t have to read the articles or the commentary to know that rather than looking at the actual socio-economic forces at work, the article is just going to make a lame connection between some out of context statistics in a way that will make clueless people of a certain age nod and congratulate themselves on being a better, more mature person those “those darn kids!”
The one that broke me was soap. I kept seeing slightly outraged comments on Twitter about bar soap vs other kinds of soap that I didn’t quite understand. Clearly all these folks were commenting on some article or something that I hadn’t seen. Then I saw one comment tied the term millennials to soap, and I thought, “Oh, no! Now what?” So I had to go find the articles in question.
“Millennials Aren’t Buying Bar Soap and It’s Killing the Industry!” —it really isn’t any more ridiculous than the others, I suppose, but I found myself feeling a little outraged, too. The actual statistics buried in the article are this: sales of bar soap have been going down an average of 2.2 percent per year for the last five years or so, and the vast majority of bar soap that is still being sold is being purchased by people over the age of 60. But the other statistic buried right along in there: sales of soap overall have been increasing over the same period of time at a rate of 3% a year. And the same companies manufacture and sell body wash and liquid hand soap, so there actually isn’t any problem for the industry at all. But they tried to hide even that part by changing the time scale of how they described it.
Before I’d reached the point where the article undermines its own headline, I was already getting irritated because I’m under 60 and we buy bar soap regularly. And let’s be honest, it’s my husband, who is ten years younger than me who buys most of them because he prefers bars. I’m the older one who loves body wash and keeps multiple dispensers of liquid soap next to every faucet in the house. (Not because I believe the myth that soap bars harbor dangerous bacteria; it’s because I’m clumsy and drop bars all the time, and because I like having a choice of scents when I wash my hands or hair or whatever. The shower has four or five different scents of shampoo and matching conditioners and complimentary body washes because I’m a weirdo.)
So it’s ridiculous clickbait you can dismantle in a few minutes. I decided I’d already wasted enough time thinking about it and I should definitely not write a blog post about it. Then, this weekend, I couldn’t look at any social media stream (unless I used the filters that only showed me the tiny subset of those streams being written by people I know personally) without seeing all the backlash. There was a lot of backlash–joke after joke about how clueless Boomers are. Many were at least chuckle-worthy. But I kept seeing, again and again, jokes that mentioned specific ages. It was clear that a lot of the people posting them thought that the term Baby Boomer referred to anyone older than, say, mid-thirties.
That’s how I found myself typing out an explanation about the definition of the Baby Boom, the sociological arguments for why one of the definitions made more sense than others, the economic arguments why yet another definition was better, and so on. The fact is that the whole “generation” thing is a silly mess no matter how you look at it. And I was ranting about why these jokes were as intellectually-shallow to the situation as the original headlines and… and… and…
Of course the jokes are parodies. A parody is supposed to be even more ludicrous than the thing being parodied. Meanwhile, if I posted my mansplaining, I would be even more ridiculous, still!
But, there are a couple of things I do have to get off my chest. One of the academic definitions of the term, “Baby Boomer” puts both myself and my mother in the same generation. And it puts my father in the generation before the Baby Boom, yet he was only 10 months older than my mom. I know we’re a weird case. I was born six days before my father’s 18th birthday. My parents were both 17 years old when I was born. On the other hand, my dad was 34 when my youngest half-sister was born. Going strictly by the arbitrary dates some people use, then, dad was a Silent Generation man who married a two different Baby Boomers, sired another Baby Boomer, and sired a bunch of Gen X-ers.
If you, instead, use the dates on the info graphic I swiped from Price Consulting, well, we spread out a little more, with me landing smack in the middle of Generation Jones, my oldest sister almost getting in the same generation as me, and then the younger siblings all solidly in Generation X.
Any cut-off dates have to be arbitrary.
My childhood didn’t include any of the 1950s. That makes my culturally programmed expectations different than those of my parents’ generation, for instance. My childhood includes the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy. That gives me a slightly different impression of the world than my husband who was born after all three. I voted against Reagan—twice! And was close to tears the night he was re-elected. That gives me a different impression of the 80s than friends who were born while Bill Clinton was in the White House.
But, due to a variety of complications (including the fact that my father refused to sign financial aid applications) I didn’t go to university until I was in my mid-twenties. So friends I graduated from High School with came out of college practically debt-free, whereas I had student loans that added up to more than the assessed value (at the time) of my dad’s house or my grandparents’ house. Which means economically I have a bit more in common with the cliché Millennial than my own generation (whichever one you stick me in).
All of which is a really round-about way to get to this: the economy is f—ed up for almost everyone.
Maybe the stereotypical Boomer owns their own home, but not all of them by any means. And even the ones that do are finding themselves being buried under medical bills and the like, can’t afford to retire, and often are trying to help their own kids and grandkids keep their heads above water. Folks a bit younger than that are sandwiched between aging parents or other relatives whose failing health (and sometimes mental faculties) are throwing unexpected responsibilities on them while they’re still trying to get their own kids out of the nest. Folks a little younger still are stuck in jobs they hate, paying rent that keeps going up faster than their wages, trying to explain to their grandparents why they don’t feel the need to own (and try to pay upkeep, insurance, et al for) a car, trying not to be a burden on their parents who they see are spending a lot of time worrying about the grandparents, and don’t see how they’re ever going to get their heads above water to begin with.
And the clickbaiters have succeeded in getting us all making fun of each other. Meanwhile parasites like Donald Trump and Peter Thiel and Martin Shkreli are happily siphoning billions out of the pockets of middle and working class people of all ages, and into their off-shore tax-sheltered accounts.
Maybe we should find a way to unite against the actual enemy?
Font Folly 