Smart people saying smart things

Smart people saying smart things April 9, 2014

Brittney Cooper: “It’s not about you, white liberals: Why attacks on radical people of color are so misguided”

Anger is a legitimate political emotion. And if your life is marked by injustices big and small each and every day, then rage, too, is a legitimate political emotion. I made the choice, though, to let my rage be generative, productive rage, the kind of rage that emboldens me to build the world I want to see rather than take a sledgehammer to all the things I hate. I stay mad. But there is a method to my madness.

Eric Waggoner: “I’m From West Virginia and I’ve Got Something to Say About the Chemical Spill”

To hell with every single screwjob elected official and politico under whose watch it all went on, who helped write those lax regulations and then turned away when even those weren’t followed. To hell with you all, who were supposed to be stewards of the public interest, and who sold us out for money, for political power. To hell with every one of you who decided that making life convenient for business meant making life dangerous for us. To hell with you for making us the eggs you had to break in order to make breakfast.

To hell with everyone who ever asked me how I could stand to live in a place like this, so dirty and unhealthy and uneducated. To hell with everyone who ever asked me why people don’t just leave, don’t just quit (and go to one of the other thousand jobs I suppose you imagine are widely available here), like it never occurred to us, like if only we dumb hilljacks would listen as you explained the safety hazards, we’d all suddenly recognize something that hadn’t been on our radar until now.

Bruce Garrett: “Can’t We All Just Get Along … You Miserable Child-Molesting Perverts?”

This is such a hoot. The Gays Are Coming For Your Children message is Exactly what you trot out when you Don’t want a rational discussion, you just want to push people’s buttons.

Forgive and forget? At least say you’re sorry. Not that you’re sorry we got angry, not that you’re sorry we felt hurt, but that what you did was wrong. And if that’s too much to ask of you then, let’s face it, you’re still in the fight aren’t you…you’re still waiting for your next chance to arouse the old hatreds, the mindless passions, against me and others like me, and what you want isn’t for me to put it all behind me and let’s have a fresh start and all be fellow Americans again, but for me and others like me to let our guard back down so you can kick us in the face again.

Robert Boston, in Taking Liberties:

But Griswold, from the perspective of members of the religious Right, stands for much more. It is, in many ways, a rebuke of their vision of America. The religious Right’s America is an America where women know their place, gays remain invisible, and sex outside of marriage doesn’t happen.

Griswold upset this tidy applecart. Of course, Griswold didn’t result in or force a change in societal attitudes. It would be easy to argue that Griswold reflected changing attitudes and didn’t drive them. The point is, the attitudes began to change, and Griswold, by codifying these changes in the law, greatly pushed things along. The America that the religious Right had assumed would endure forever — the America that, for so long, granted religious conservatives the right to tell others what to do — wasn’t just challenged, it was turned on its head.


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