Not the job of the oppressed to prove their humanity

Recently the Red Hen restaurant somewhere in the Washington, DC area refused to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the person who stands in the White House news room and lies for the nasty guy. That has caused the discussion about civility to boil over again.

The Democratic leadership in Congress called for civility, saying being uncivil doesn’t get us anywhere. Bernie Sanders did too – prompting lots of responses about how his whole shtick is about being uncivil, followed by those who are amazed at how uncivil he was to Hillary Clinton and how civil he wants us to be to the nasty guy.

In Between the Lines, Michigan’s LGBT newspaper, D’Anne Witkowski, awarded her Creep of the Week column to Sarah Sanders. A couple of her ideas:

Being nice doesn’t save lives. It doesn’t change harts and minds. And it sure as hell isn’t going to save our democracy.
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It is not the job of the oppressed to prove their humanity to the oppressors.

Racists aren’t racist just because they haven’t encountered enough nice black and brown people. Homophobes don’t hate gays because they just haven’t had the right one wait on the in a restaurant. Misogynists don’t hate women just because they haven’t met the right one yet.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville has had enough with the false equivalences between progressives and conservatives. She says there are “vast and irreconcilable differences between the ‘both sides’ that we are meant to understand are similarly problematic.” She elaborates on those differences and wonders how they can coexist. Speaking of progressives:

These folks support universal healthcare access, jobs with liveable wages, legal and accessible abortion, racial justice, gender justice, full LGBTQ equality, disability rights, voting rights, equal pay for all, restrictions on guns, regulations on capitalism, fair housing, public education, desegregation, criminal justice reforms, asylum, a fully funded social safety net, and other policies that broadly recognize the humanity of their fellow countrypersons.

It's the policy of empathy, struck through a rational self-interest driven by the understanding that we are all in the same leaky, creaky, unreliable boat.

And of conservatives:

These folks support whatever personally benefits them, or, failing that, what will provide maximum harm to the people they've erroneously decided are responsible for their not having the life they want. Restrict healthcare to those who can afford it, good jobs are for white men, criminalize abortion, white is right, women are trash except their moms and wives, no gay marriage, trans people aren't real, more guns, fewer regulations, privatize schools, militarize the police, shut down the borders, no entitlements, fuck you.

It's the policy of selfishness, of privilege, of insularity, insecurity, ignorance, bigotry, hatred.
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The difference, however, despite the pundits' and politicians' insistence on concealing this rather significant reality, is that I want to enact laws that let us both live our lives as closely as possible to the way we'd like and *they want me fucking dead*.

At least some of them. Many of them. Large numbers. I've got 14 years of missives from their ranks to prove it.
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I don't know how we can coexist as a nation when we can't agree on the most fundamental issue of basic empathy. I'm not sure that we can. But what I do know is that I won't abet some sickening false harmony with authoritarian sadists by offering them my capitulation under the auspices of "civility."

All this talk of incivility added to the news of the retirement of Anthony Kennedy from the Supreme Court (and knowing who will choose the replacement) prompted McEwan to write that it’s okay to not feel everything will be okay.

She does not want people to tell her it will be okay. It isn’t okay now and will likely get worse. She doesn’t want people to tell her we just need to work harder. We progressives have been working hard for decades to create a just society and it is being dismantled with glee, malice, and haste. She doesn’t want people to tell her she just needs to vote. We did in 2016. And having a majority didn’t protect us from what is happening now and the reasons why the majority lost haven’t been fixed.

What I need is the respect that I'm despairing for a reason. That reason is because I understand how difficult it was to achieve the things we're losing, because I was one of the people who dedicated my life to trying to achieve them.

What I need is to not be accused of "giving up" because I insist on being honest about where we stand. If I had given up, trust that I wouldn't be writing these words.

What I need is understanding that not all of us are motivated in every instance by optimism, and that, in this moment, exhorting me to display an optimism I'm not experiencing feels oppressively smothering.

What I need is to not be fucking gaslighted.