My folks (now in their late 70s) weren't super well-equipped to deal with emotional content and/or complexity. I didn't learn anything about interacting with women from them. No sex talks, no dating advice, none of it. 2/
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I was left to extrapolate all that stuff from the shit going on around me, which meant I basically don't think I saw women as fully-realized humans until somewhere in my 20s. I went through a period mid-college where I was undateable 3/
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And of course that's where anger and blame start happening, but ultimately that period is where I started to learn empathy and put together that I was acting like a shit 4/
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Anyway, I think at several points before my mid-20s I could've turned dark and been an incel (or a libertarian, FFS) and it was only because I got out of the community I was raised in and started being around people not like me that I started to get it 5/
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The racial and gender problems of this world, clearly, are still legion, and anecdote is not evidence, but if the societal forces now are such that a person raised in the environment I was raised in can feel like I do now then I have hope 6/
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I mean I remember my grandparents referring to MLK as a "troublemaker," my mom saying "but think about the children" trying to dissuade me from dating a black woman, my grandmother saying that me and my ex would have "beautiful tar babies" 7/
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That was learned behavior from them. Their environments trained them to feel that way. And they largely never saw anything different throughout long lives. It doesn't excuse anything, but nonetheless that's the truth and it's not easy to reconcile with "being a good person" 8/
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I think at a certain point people become lost causes, and when they do we have to take space from them. And we can write all kinds of hand-wringing articles about how they feel "alienated" but guess what? They need to feel alienated. 9/
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They need to understand that if they want to deny people basic human rights based on some racist/gendered horseshit then they have to sacrifice their comfort and power. 10/
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There's a corollary there, the need to recognize that no matter how pure your spirit or "what you've done" for equality, there are systemic advantages in place that have benefitted and/or worked against you even if you're on the 'right' side or if you've 'worked for' yours 11/
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Hard part, increasingly, seems to be figuring out how to keep people that start to feel this way from fucking it all up for the rest of us, from all this Trump bullshit to shooting up the joint 12/
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...Forcing progress over those objections without dehumanizing those who object and starting that radicalization. Seems impossible right now, but a lot of stuff has in the past. 13/
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Blah blah blah. This has been Dispatches from a Broken America Vol. MCMXLII 14/14
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