Am I an ex-liberal?
“I watched every sane person lose their ever-loving mind following government propaganda with covid. If you did too, bless your heart. You can still wake up.”
I know the small amount of readers I currently have were waiting so long for a post about my 30 year relationship of subordination and mental drowning. I may return to that story at some point, but the further I am out from it, the less it comes to mind anyway.
What I am aching to write about for the past few months, but really the last couple of years, to be honest, is what the hell is going on in the world. I mean this politically, psychologically, physically, scientifically… I suppose we could come at all of the subjects troubling me from every one of these perspectives.
I posted recently on my Facebook page that I am coming out as not a leftist anymore. That I don’t know what I am or who I am anymore. That this bullshit of the left telling us we have to hate people who disagree with us is absurd and dangerous. The left has created a place where free speech is literally restricted. I cannot even speak to some family members and a lot of my friends because I have a questioning mind and I want to debate and have down to earth conversations (like we all used to) about laws, trends, and how it fits into our lives.
I had a political radio show for 3 years on KPFT in Houston. KPFT is one of the largest locally owned radio stations in the entire nation. The listenership is obviously vast in such a large city. Something that the Pacifica network of stations prides itself on is that they were the first station to provide a place for oppositional people to come and have real debate over the airways with civility and equal moderation. I have no idea if KPFT or the network stuck with these principals through covid. I doubt it because I watched every sane person lose their ever-loving mind following government propaganda with covid. If you did too, bless your heart. You can still wake up.
I am sure that what I should do from here is cover certain topics. What I want to do first is talk about my feelings. This has been sad and painful. I bet I am not the only person who feels isolated and alone not just because of lock-downs, but because we have literally been divided up into smaller and smaller blocks of group-think while being told that we are part of a large group.
I will say I have always been a bit outside of the two boxes we have to choose from in the United States. I certainly never identified with Republican, but I have always been open the Democratic Party also did not qualify as “me” in a way it did for most other people in it. However, I was “mostly a Democrat” with a side of anarchism (which only means that government should be small and very local so that it can’t be totalitarian and makes laws over people that it does not even know the lives or struggles of.)
One thing that I have disagreed with about the big D’s since I had my first child at 21 is vaccine mandates. I believe in complete bodily autonomy and that the government should stay completely out of medicine in all aspects. I did not say I am anti-vaccine. I said that I do not agree with mandates of any kind. Do not dare to begin to pigeonhole me. I have never dissuaded anyone else from a vaccine of themselves or their children. I did present actual parents and practitioners who had lived through or seen vaccine injuries. These stories are not just stories, they are real humans with lives and families.
No stories should ever be unheard because you are afraid it will change someone’s mind. Minds are meant to grow. It is human to grow. And I would argue that we are literally anti-humanity right now. This right down to telling humans that we are the worst thing that has ever happened to the earth and there is no way to ever become clean (enter here biblical-style fear-based bullshit re-asserted into society’s psyche.) What has happened in these last few years is to tell society that if you dare to grow (your own research and use your own mind), you will be ousted from all of society. This is an extremely deep wound to inflict.
Do not be curious. Do not dare. What is a human, but a curious being whose talent for such proclivities has lead to science, deep feelings of connectedness, art, and intellectual depth? We are being vilified for being human in this very primal aspect of ourselves.
A recent experience with a long-term friend
I recently felt very compelled to discuss an extremely hot topic with a close friend. I approached with tons of trepidation and fear and had ample amounts of normal anxiety that, if I broached the topic, they would no longer speak to me at all. But this person is an academic and I decided to trust the human desire for growth and open discussion and not succumb to the fears society has doled out heartily in the past 3 years.
It went terribly. I have lost a friend of many years. A friend who has helped me with hard times and a friend who has reached out to me on parenting issues many times because my 3 kids are grown and theirs are still in grade school and jr high.
I was called a TERF (which I had to look up what that even is). I decided to overlook that and continue to say that I was doing a lot of research on the topic and listening to real people with experience who have been harmed and are living with the repercussions of this now-political issue.
To my horror, I was told in no uncertain terms to NOT EVER listen to anyone classified as “on the right” and that any information I found on the “other side” of the issue are ALL horrible people spreading disinformation. Joe Rogan was even mentioned and I immediately admitted that I love listening to his podcast! I don’t have to agree with everything Joe Rogan himself says, but I am a thinking adult and he very often interviews fascinating people on a wealth of interesting topics. Why would I cut out information from my life because of the interviewer?
To even think of doing such a close-minded thing sickens me, honestly. All I could think was that this whole conversation felt like some Nazi era shit where people are not allowed to talk of certain subjects lest they be seen as a threat to the regime.
I am obviously a threat because I think hard and deeply. I have ALWAYS looked at every issue from every standpoint that I can find. I want to know not only the arguments made by all sides, but I also want to check my gut from all perspectives.
The subject we were discussing (although discussion is a far stretch from how it went down) is one that I have years of experience with in my life. I have been having an immense amount of cognitive dissonance in the last few years about how it is being projected and how it has changed. The cognitive dissonance was purely from my own personal experience and my own ideas about child psychology (which I happen to have a lot of thoughts and research under my belt about.) This sense of “something is going really wrong here” lead to my to throw myself into listening to every panel, every doctor, everything I could find on the subject. But all of this is backed up with my own life living in a community affected.
Anyway, the root of this story is that I was hurt and appalled by someone I respect reacting in such an alarmist way about me wanting to consider things from all sides. That, in itself, is the root of the problem I want to address here from here on out.
Scarlet Pearl 