Resentment vs. gratitude: from parking spaces to ASL

Resentment vs. gratitude: from parking spaces to ASL January 14, 2025

The MAGA right is now denouncing ASL interpreters as “woke.” Mojo’s Julia Métraux has a round-up of this latest weird eruption from folks like Charlie Kirk and Christopher Rufo, who are going after sign language as the latest supposedly burdensome imposition that minorities make on the beleaguered, aggrieved white majority he represents, “LA Is Burning, and the Right Is Furious—About Sign Language Interpreters.”

It’s not clear why the MAGA voters who are Rufo’s marks are supposed to resent the deaf or the presence of those who interpret for them. It “neither breaks their leg nor picks their pocket,” as Thomas Jefferson said, to have someone off to the side signing at a press conference. Rufo whines that it’s distracting to him, somehow — which seems like a him problem, a lack of focus and discipline on his part. And he darkly hints that the presence of ASL interpreters is some budget-busting expense burdening taxpayers.

But this still strikes me as a difficult sell — as something it is not easy to convince others they need to be upset about. This does not directly affect any felt need even for the ungrateful and resentful white folks who make up the core of Rufo’s and Kirk’s target audience.

I suppose they can shoehorn this into the generic category of a “my tax dollars are being spent on other people who aren’t me, personally” complaint. That’s a huge part of the entire Rufo/MAGA/”anti-woke” shtick and has been a central organizing principle for the right ever since at least the “Tea Party.” That’s always effective as a general appeal to personal, individual selfishness, but it seems like a stretch here. Sure, ASL interpreters aren’t volunteers so, yeah, there’s some non-zero taxpayer expenditure involved here, but even for an audience of MAGA voters who deliriously enjoy pretending that “foreign aid” is half of the federal budget, the expense of ASL interpreters is not going to seem like a budget-busting boondoggle.

And while the selfish, resentful white MAGA folks who supported Rufo’s previous campaigns against teaching history and his ongoing resegregation efforts have shown they clearly share his anti-Black prejudice, I’m not sure they’re automatically on board with his reflexively anti-deaf sentiment, at least not as a starting point. They’ll get there, I’m sure — the resentment game is a one-way ratchet — but it’s take a bit of work for them to participate in creating excuses to resent deaf people, who weren’t previously a group they would have come up with as part of “Those People.”

In a sense, the anti-woke attack on ASL interpretation is a defensive maneuver. It is a necessary step for Kirk and Rufo to protect their agenda and to keep their base in line.

Especially in this context — the context of tragedy and natural disaster. That’s always a dangerous context for MAGA ideology. It’s a place where they can start to lose people, where even some of their most lockstep-faithful devotees can stumble or start to waver.

The entire MAGA movement — Trumpism, “anti-woke,” resegregation — is based on a choice that must be chosen all the time. And thus it is a choice that must be directed and steered and enforced on every occasion on which it presents itself. A press conference by officials discussing the horrific toll of a natural disaster is exactly such an occasion.

The choice they must make, every time, is to choose resentment over gratitude. Gratitude is like kryptonite to their resentment-driven agenda. They cannot allow it, cannot abide it, cannot risk the possibility of it. And the press conferences about the fires in Los Angeles invite the possibility of gratitude.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Fox-addicted resentment junkie who has spent years training yourself in the habits of this ideology. Even if you’ve got a full arsenal of defense mechanisms ready to deploy against any disaster, anywhere, so that you can dismissively explain it away, reassuring yourself that Those People deserve it or brought it on themselves with their depraved coastal elite ways, you’re still witnessing families losing their homes, their possessions, their cherished memories. You’re seeing people displaced, forced to flee by sudden calamities beyond their control. And you’re watching this from the comfort of your own home. This makes even those defense mechanisms dangerous. The thoughts MAGA has trained them to think — “Well, I’m not going to lose my home because, unlike Those People, I don’t deserve to” — tiptoe dangerously close to the recognition that “I have not lost my home, unlike those I’m seeing,” and even despite all that training and practice this can still lead to something too much like gratitude.

That’s deadly toxic for MAGA. MAGA only works if those who have homes stay focused on resenting those who do not.

And so MAGA cannot afford for its people — in this weak moment in which they may be tempted to choose gratitude over resentment — to be presented with a second temptation in the form of those ASL interpreters. Their presence serves as a reminder that “I can hear the speaker, but others cannot,” which again is just an arms-length away from the danger of gratitude.

So folks like Rufo and Kirk really don’t have any choice here but to push back hard, to go on the attack, throwing everything they have at the situation to ensure that their followers will rise to the challenge and find a way to choose resentment over gratitude, even here, where it seems nearly impossible.

This is part of why conservatives and tyrants have always been “intersectional,” even before some “woke” liberal academic type came up with a word for it.

“You must now practice resenting deaf people” is an odd assignment for the MAGA faithful, but they’ll learn to play along, cultivating and developing the habit until it becomes second-nature, something as reflexive and unthinking as the idea of “welfare queens” or the paradox of “lazy immigrants stealing jobs.”

Think again of the way the white right in America has trained itself to resent “the handicapped” in general. This is as absurd and seemingly impossible as every other form of upside-down resentment — the wealthy resenting the poor, white Americans resenting Black Americans, etc. — but that absurdity was obscured, in part, by daily practice and training involving “handicapped parking spaces.”

Those parking spaces offer us a daily crossroads, a recurring choice between the opposite paths of gratitude and resentment.

It’s raining, the parking lot is crowded, and the only open space anywhere near the door is reserved for the handicapped. So you park hundreds of feet farther away and have to splash your way across the entire parking lot to get to the store. As you do so, you see that parking space, and now you get to choose.

You can choose to remember that yes, it’s raining and I’m soaked, and yes, this place is crowded, but hey — I am healthy and can walk all the way across this whole parking lot without pain or injury. And you can choose to be grateful because of that. You will remind yourself that others do not enjoy this luxury and privilege of just being able to walk, but you do. The thankfulness and gratitude that accompanies that reminder will make you happier, and that will, in turn, make others around you happier, because to be thankful is to be “much obliged” — and when you’re overflowing with gratitude and obligation it spills all over the place. You will become grateful not only for your own health, but grateful also for the practice of reserving parking spaces for those who need them because you are much obliged and it seems, almost literally, like the least we can do for them.

Or you can splash across that rainy parking lot and see that parking space and choose not to be be grateful, not to be obliged, and not to be happy.

This is where everything about MAGA world and people like Chris Rufo gets really weird and dark. They’re choosing not to be happy. Deliberately. Why would anyone want to do that?

We’ll get to the why later. Here I’m just focused on the how. This is how to choose misery, and to spread misery — by choosing resentment instead of gratitude.

You look at that handicapped parking space and you work as hard as you can to make it something you can resent. Train yourself to ask whiny, laughably foolish questions like “Why should they get to park there when I can’t?” while pretending that you don’t notice how whiny and laughably foolish such questions are. Even if you were in a good mood previously, train yourself to turn that into a bad mood at any moment, because of a reserved parking space, or a braille elevator button, or a curb cut-out, or an ASL interpreter.

It takes work, but you can learn to do it if you really, really want to. Put in that work and, eventually, you can be an ungrateful jerk who resents deaf people just for existing and who almost believes the lies you’re telling yourself about how their presence in this world makes you more entitled and aggrieved.

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