Thursday, November 10, 2016

My Son Responds to His Facebook Critics

As a proud Mom, I had to share the following, which my savvy, proudly contrarian son (who is a university freshman and has dual Canadian-American citizenship) posted on his Facebook page:
Aside from my relentless spam of posts due to the election, I thought I should say something serious. While many people may think that I supported Donald Trump, the reality is the I could have voted for him if I wanted to but I chose not to vote at all. Nobody, not even minor parties like the Libertarians or the Greens, represented my political positions well enough to deserve my vote.
That being said, while people across my feed are expressing "shock" and "disgust" over Trump's win, you can almost always see in these posts why Trump won. 
Trump's victory was a pushback against the oppression of the poor, working-class person. America's rural communities, something the vast majority of the city folk on my feed have never experienced, are what put Trump into office. America's rural communities have been decaying for half a century as the result of being ignored by mainstream politicians who have generally focussed on the big cities. These are people who live in towns where the big factory closed 20 years ago and they have been struggling paycjeck to paycheck ever since. These are people who may want to leave their towns to the city, but are confronted by a cost of living so astronomical that they could not possibly afford it. They also come from a culture where dependence is considered shameful, so they cannot rely on the government to get them into office.
Yet whenever these people who's culture and way of life is literally on life support, they are told that they still have their "white privilege" or their "male privilege" or their "straight privilege" or whatever privilege they supposedly have but cannot really see because they are still poor and living in hopeless communities. No matter how bad their situation gets, they are only told by the establishment and the media that in some far off urban center, there are even more underprivileged people who are a victim of these rural folk who try to preserve their way of live. They are sick of, over the past 8 years, the media turning these people into an acceptable punching bag, while they can still be called racist or sexist when they are neither. 
This has been the problem with the modern left. While the left of the past wished to reach out to the working class and listen to their needs, the modern left thinks that a bunch of smug, rich liberals in the city and in universities can accurately pinpoint the problems of the working class, and when the working class points out what their problems actually are, the left will be so out of touch as to completely ignore them and then mock them for their supposed "racism," "sexism," or whatever "-ism" or "-phobia" they are supposedly displaying. 
So to all the smug, upper-class liberals on my feed who are beginning their posts with "as a woman," "as a Jew," "as a homosexual," or any other "as a [insert minority here]," Trumps victory is entirely the fault of people like you. People who live in the top 1% of the world's wealth, yet think that Trump's victory is more threatening and harmful to them than the past 50 years of disastrous economic policies have been towards the working poor in the United States specifically, and the Western World in general. It is people who think that their opinions are somehow more relevant because they identify as an "oppressed group" even though they are significantly better off than those living in poverty in the United States. It is people who think that being a woman, or being a homosexual, or being in another "oppressed" group makes you worse off than living in hopeless poverty. Trump's victory is a rebuke of this attitude. 
While Democrats can play the blame game and try to blame literally everyone but themselves for Trump's historic win, I will wait and watch. 
To the next person who is going to make a post victimizing themselves to comment on Trump's victory, make sure you begin it with "as a first-world white Jewish person who lives in the top 1% of human wealth in a cozy suburban neighbourhood of a city that has one of the highest qualities of life in the world," because your relentless victimization of yourself is nothing compared to what those in impoverished rural communities are experiencing right now. I know this description does not apply to everyone on my friends list, but it applies to at least 75% of them. 
And no, this is not a personal attack on anyone. This is an argument against the victim-mentally and identity politics which I consistently see being displayed by those who live in what can only be described as some of the highest standards of living in history.

3 comments:

Frances said...

OTT, but do hope y our son is filing both Canadian and US tax returns each spring. The IRS is getting increasingly cranky when non-resident Americans don't file.

Moe said...

Your son is brilliant. Just a little niggle:point out to him the difference between "who's" and "whose" and he will be perfect. :)

Here's some more ammo for him at Prog U.
We are told it was the great unwashed who elected Trump, but 45% of those deplorables voted for HER. Between 49% and 52% of college grads voted for Clinton, but 45% went with Trump. Not too shabby. And in the rarified atmosphere of the post grad, 37% voted for Trump. Oh, the horror!

scaramouche said...

Frances--we know, we know.

Moe--Thanks for the praise. I think he's pretty freaking brilliant, too