Friday 15 March 2013

Why pickets, petitions, charity mugging, and militant activism is *so* 20th century

Right up until the present day, all the great suffrages, protests, political and activist movements over the last 150 years, have all fought hard to end discrimination and create equality and opportunity for empowerment for women, persons with disabilities, the LBGTQI (did I get all the letters? In the right order?) community, and so on. The myth of equality and empowerment for all, however, has become derailed in most cases in the present day, and may not have been a sustainable idea to begin with.

They generally boil down to rights without responsibilities; senseless notions of entitlement, crusader mentalities gone wrong; natural selection turned on its head, to the peril of the entire human race. Why? Because there do exist hard-coded biological and temporal restrictions on what people can and can't do. This is a discussion for another time. But the point I want to make here is simple: In the past, activists have had to fight, be militant, dangerous, courageous, and noisy, in order to generate heat, from which came the light required to shine upon the injustice of their plight, in order to have made the wrong right. Notice I use past tenses there; I do so deliberately, as the time for being noisy and militant, for edgy polemic, the activist's zeal and the campus protest warrior, is past. Such people do two things successfully: the first is secure priority treatment for themselves at the expense of whoever they blame for 'oppressing' them, thus reversing the pendulum in a most hypocritical manner. The second is, they don't create light, just friction, thus annoying everybody, which would not bother me so much if they didn't turn good and/or intelligent people off the causes they are misrepresenting so depressingly.

All groups, to my mind, follow the same pattern, making the specific cause they represent mostly irrelevant. We will take a look at some of these causes and communities in turn, and hope to unpack the pattern along the way. I hope my point will become clear, both to myself and to you, dear reader. Thus far, my point is simple: that if you refuse to, don't know when to, put up your sword, then all you do is piss the world off and damage your cause.

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