Zman has a really appalling story, demonstrating just how far down the road to PC totalitarianism things have gone in this country, even in basicaly rural red states like Kentucky.
This story [is] from Kentucky, of all places… Two children and two adults have been arrested for racism. That’s not the specific charge. Instead the state has invented a novel new crime called “harassing communication†which means it is against the law to upset the wrong people with your public utterances. Since there’s not official list of people one must avoid upsetting, the state is free to arrest anyone for their speech on the claim that someone may be upset by it.
At this point, it is tempting to make a comparison to the Stasi or maybe Stalin’s KGB, but that would be a slander against the communists. They were always quite clear about who you could never criticize and what you must never dispute. When Stalin’s boys dragged you from your home, you knew exactly why you were being hauled away by the police. Every man in the gulag knew why he was there. The novelty of liberal democracy is in keeping everyone in the dark about these things.
Another novelty is that in communism, everyone also knew to avoid taking the side of the accused and they knew why to avoid it. That was another thing Westerners would brag about during the Cold War. In America, when someone was bullied by the state, lawyers would volunteer to defend the accused. A common phrase used by Progressive civil and political rights activists back then was “I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it.â€
It turns out to have been a complete lie. Not only will no one fight to the death to defend speech, the great and the good line up to condemn anyone for speaking out. Where is the ACLU in these cases? Certainly not rushing to defend children against the crime of saying mean things. No, the ACLU is too busy ratting out heretics and blasphemers, who dare question the liberal democratic ideology. In one of life’s great ironies, all of the civil rights groups now work to limit your civil rights.
Notice also how the concept of rights has changed. Thirty years ago, even left-wing political actors accepted the old definition of rights, as limits on the state. Your right to speak out against the government was really a hard limit on the state to police the speech of the citizens. Today, rights are just demands from an increasingly minoritized population for things to which no one can have a right. In this Kentucky case, they demand the community celebrate their mating decisions.
That should be the story here. This family moves to the community and begins making demands on the community. The white mother and her mulatto daughter start harassing the school about the racial complexion of the curriculum. The father demands the teachers change their classrooms to satisfy the demands of his children. This mixed-race family instantly became a cancer on the community, by making an increasingly narrow set of demands in the name of their rights.
This is one of the new realities of liberal democracy. Instead of people fearing the secret police and their many spies, the people fear the civil rights activists and their auxiliary army of novel weirdos. A mixed-race couple of trannies moves into the neighborhood and everyone is gripped with fear. It not only means everyone has to play make-believe with the lunatics, but must live in fear of upsetting them in some way. The agent of terror is the bespoke weirdo and its crazy demands for acceptance.
When exactly did Americans citizens acquire a right to never be called bad names? When did American voters concede to our noisiest, most sensitive, and most opinionated the authority to define exactly what attitudes and opinions are “acceptable”?
OneGuy
Over the last 60 years or so I a North East Yankee have met many Southerners and good old boys. I joined the AF in 1964 and spent some time in Mississippi. Without exception these Southern friends were respectful to blacks they knew or did not know. I never heard the “N” word used disrespectfully (as in intended to intimidate someone) but I did hear it in conversation. Almost without exception every Southerner I met in the 60’s and 70’s had strong feelings about the civil war and the reconstruction. I learned a lot from them that was not in our history books. It was because of those strong feelings about the civil war that Southerners liked to show the battle flag. Not because of slavery or to intimidate black people. Very few Southerners had owned slaves and most Southerners lived a life not much better than slaves themselves Because of this blacks and whites got along and formed friendships in the old South and this carried forward into the 1960’s when things began to change.
The change was pushed by a divide and conquer technique that made the Southern whites ands blacks dislike each other even some who had been friends in their youth. This was intentional, partly to force needed change and partly to give power and money to specific individuals. The change happened, if you had lived in the South in the 80’s and 90’s some good changes took place and it was a more peaceful and just time. But the need by some to keep that power and money flowing kept the pressure on and the younger black children were convinced that the entire South and indeed the entire white race was against them and constantly committing atrocities on them. This change too has been profound. There is literally no large city in the South where a white person can walk safely after dark because of the roaming black gangs and individuals. This is exactly the situation the race baiters wanted, it maximizes their power, consolidates their voting block and keeps their constituency from ever escaping their self imposed racial divide. But these kinds of movements need constant feeding and one way they have done that is to declare that the Confederate battle flag is racist and anyone who shows it is a racist.
The sadness about this story for me is that intentionally or not this family has feed that racial divide and made it difficult for them to accept white kids as friends. Having said that I am also saddened by the apparent fact that the white families too have chosen to aggressively push back. At this point I do not believe it is possible to show the battle flag without it being considered racist AND I think that some who show it do so intending to be racist. I also believe that on those rare occasions where the battle flag shows up at a conservative rally that those cases are “false” flags planted by the left to create controversy and defeat the purpose of the demonstration.
Boligat
We had a similar situation where I live (the Ozarks), but it involved another type of ‘special’ family. This was a white family, but their son was disabled and got around school in a wheelchair. Well, they moved into the district after the year had started and immediately started making demands.
Our small elementary school was built on a hillside with the cafeteria on the bottom and opening out to the rear playground and the rest of the offices and classes on the main floor which also opened onto the main playground and parking lot. Well, in order to eat lunch in the cafeteria one had to navigate the stairs, which the new kid could not do in his wheelchair.
So, the school made arrangements so that one kid out of his class went downstairs and brought back lunch for both of them. Then the kid ate lunch with the new kid. The rest of the kids didn’t mind doing this, they understood the situation.
This wasn’t good enough for the parents. They demanded that the district put in an elevator so that their kid could get up and down and be with everyone else at lunch. They said their kid felt discriminated against because of his disability. The new installation would cost the district around $30,000 to do. (This was a number of years ago, when $30,000 was a major chunk of change.) The district didn’t have that kind of money. The family moved in after the year had started and no such money had been budgeted for the expense. So they told the family they didn’t have the money but for next year they would be able to budget it in. Not good enough. The parents threatened to sue.
The superintendent was bemoaning the situation with some fellow superintendents at an area administrators convention and found out from the superintendent of the family’s former district that the family had done the same thing there. They had sued that school district, won, and then after all the construction was done, they moved out.
So, knowing their history, our district settled out of court and went to work putting in the new elevator. When it was completed the family moved again.
Jerryskids
In the famous words of a wise professor, “I don’t want to live on this planet any more.”
MMurcek
It is not the government’s purpose to validate or enforce any particular person’s preferences.
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