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“____ People” Just Sounds So Patronizing

 I don’t even generalize to “disabled people” like that. Our experiences are too varied. If some group of people want to advocate for something, presumably they have all agreed on what that thing is.

Actual politics is about solving a specific problem or problems. Even to say “the civil rights movement” isn’t specific enough; we’re talking about legal rights of Black Americans to exercise rights enshrined in the Constitution. The nonviolent protests led by Dr. King and others were about the social acceptance of those rights exercised. Thurgood Marshall and others had won lots of legal victories against legal segregation, but if someone is legitimately afraid to exercise those rights by the threat or exercise of violence, those rights don’t exist in reality. It was the violence by segregationist forces exposed to the nation that compelled the federal government to act to enforce civil rights law in the South. It was nonviolence that revealed who the true Christians were, if I may say, and which ones were willing to use religion to enforce a “peace” purchased with terror. 

I digress. I was going to take a (cheap) shot at Mark Shea, since he’s the perfect example of a mind and heart at odds. I might say a mind turned off, and a heart so full of anger (Republicans, Trump supporters, whoever) that he gets led around wherever the progressive activists want him to go. I can see him typing out or saying the ever-so-patronizing “gay people” on one of his ineffectual rants. It just sounds like distant “compassion” for some group he’s never actually been around, for one thing.

If we speak of “rights” we should ask, “The right to do (or say) what?” Why? To what end? Is it good? Does anyone lose out, if this right—real or imagined—is exercised?

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