My parents were not shocked, but I feel like that is basically my experience growing up. We were a conservative family and I was told that what we were conserving was a country in which people were treated fairly regardless of sex or race, immigrants were welcome and all were protected by the law.
Very similar here. My parents are extremely sincere missionaries who gave up a more comfortable life to go help other people the best way they knew, and taught us the values of empathy, sincerity, curiosity, self-examination... We're politically divided now but I can still respect them.
And so part of the foundation of my political thinking is the sense that I am not demanding radical change - I am demanding the country that, when I was a kid in the late 80s, early 90s, the kind of country you told me *we already had* (but we didn't, really, in key ways).
Honestly, part of my fury over MAGA is it feels like a broken promise. As imperfect as things were in the 90s, I was told that we had all agreed on at least the *goal* of a society where race and sex didn't limit you, in which the law was blind...and actually a bunch of those adults were lying.
right, that's it - and we get called fools for believing in that goal and that promise, but even if we may have been naive about it ever coming to fruition, nobody can tell us why were wrong to want it
Because it hurts white men's feelings if they have to actually make an effort to get into Harvard, that's why
I don't even know that it was that specific to be honest
Oh sure, that's only one factor It also hurts their feelings that they can't rape at will
I understood myself as part of a tradition of liberty, of Washington, Lincoln and MLK and also my grandfather getting two purple hearts fighting the Nazis, all for a society of greater liberty and there's a real, visceral sense that this moment is a betrayal of that, of child-me's faith in it.
And what burns me up the worst, with just the most incandescent fury is I am now raising my own child and I wanted, I *expected* to give her that same promise of, if not a just society, a -more- just society, that I had growing up and yet that dream has been betrayed by my countrymen.
Obama was elected when my kid was 9 months old. We had a good run when he was little 😭
Not only did my grandfather get multiple Purple Hearts my grandmother was literally a member of the Dutch Resistance, so yeah June 2018, right before moving to Canada, I found myself shouting their story into a bullhorn at a rally about the kids in cages at the border
They chose to settle in the US postwar because it was a free, forward-looking society!!!!
Same.
Studying history is why I've never believed in that whole arc towards justice An awful lot of the past is horrific almost beyond belief and in almost every case until very recently, the tyrants and villains just get away with it again and again. Justice is fleeting and must be bought with blood.
ah but remember they thought there was a gentleman's agreement that we would always be "aspirationally" inclusive, and then Obama goes and wins an election to the Presidency of all things, and the Bush administration was conservative in every way and it was a disaster and people noticed...
100%.
Yes, exactly. Which is the same fundamental appeal made by Martin Luther King! "Rise up and live out the true meaning of her creed."