First draft thoughts on "the high road"
UPDATE: I’m putting this post back up, but without the ability to comment. I took it down because I was getting flak I didn’t want to get, but now I’m highly irritated. The “turn the other cheek” crowd seems to have the conversational upper hand now, and I want that side to have to contend with my side (we’re not “enemies",” but we are in adversarial positions on this topic).
It’s not immoral to argue what I’m arguing. I am not villainous for arguing what I’m arguing.
It’s right there in the title—”first draft.” That means I’m thinking out loud on the page. It means I reserve the right to:
a. Not anticipate every single not all
b. Change my mind
The experience I have had over the past several years is similar to what millions of people have gone through. I’m not saying I’m special; I’m not. But I am saying that my experience is shared, and it looks like this to a lot of people:
I started changing my mind about politics and culture. I moved toward the right.
The objective lies about the words and actions of Trump and Republicans were too much for me to take quietly any more. So I said, “That’s a lie. There is a real world with real facts in it to be apprehended.”
The government and medical industry tried to force me to take an unnecessary and unproven vaccine. I said no publicly.
The government nationalized the rental market, making me, a small, one-house landlord, a vassal of the state and of my tenants. I said no publicly.
In response to my actions, my own family (my mother and her husband) actively tried to get me fired by writing to my supervisors and calling me a PR risk for any respectable organization.
Internally, my organization, my work, launched a public reputational smear campaign against me. I became an instant transphobe, Republican hate monger, misogynist, and racist. The 20 years I had worked for and with these people was immediately forgotten.
I was forced out of my 20 year career and made unemployable in mainstream society.
And now I hear calls to stop subjecting the people who did this to us to their own punishment. I hear people on my side being called “no better than the left” for actually forcing consequences on some bitch who spouts off about wanting Trump dead and lost her job over it.
This tells me that I’m even more on my own than I knew, and I learned that I’m very on my own these past few years.
People like me can be severely socially and economically punished for telling the truth and for asserting rights that we uncontroversially do have under the constitution. That’s just regrettable and sad.
But the people who did this to us cannot be punished, because we’re supposed to “rise above.”
Here’s what I take from that, if this is your position:
You approve of narcissistic abuse, you’re fine that people like me are abused this way, and you will work harder to stop us from pushing back than you will work to help us escape punishment that we did not deserve.
Perhaps someone reading this has asked him or herself internally, “Why is Josh so mistrusting? Why does he default to seeing danger?”
This is why.
Let me anticipate an objection because if I don't I'm going to be furious if I have to deal with this in comments later:
Yes. I understand that "Home Depot Lady," personally, did not do any of those things to me, or to Jane or Bob.
Yes, I still think people like Home Depot Lady should face some consequences. Why? Because it was not only "villains" like Fauci or Biden who did this to us. It was our fellow countrymen on the left.
Am I certain that what happened to Home Depot Lady, and the specific way it was done, was the best or right way? No, I'm not certain. But I'm also not going to say, "Since I'm not certain, and since it feels icky to some, then I'm going stop right now and full throatedly condemn her cancellation." If that's what you want, you're one of the people I'm talking about in the essay who approves of narcissistic abuse.
Yes. I want regular people who are doing evil to face consequences for being enablers to powerful narcissists.
While turning the other cheek, behaving with class, and not “sinking to the lowest level” have been important core values in Western culture (and should be aimed for in oneself and admired in others), there is a point at which they overlap with “enabling”. If you are a moral stickler and your opponent believes that the ends justify the means, you’re in a classic catch-22. So, somewhere down the line, you have to compromise your behavior — or you consign yourself to losing forever.