13 Comments

I see a lot of mean spiritedness.

I love sarcasm, a good snark, a clever gotcha. I understand making a mean comment if it skewers.

But much of what we see is low wit venom.

Cliche, but these are days of rage. Never seen so many angry people.

Blame (as usual) politicians, media, and big tech for exploiting fear and perceived powerlessness.

But individuals who aspire to be community leaders are exacerbating the conflicts.

Time to drop the club and maybe pick up the rapier. Or maybe stay quiet - just occasionally.

Expand full comment
author

Stay quiet? What?!? The audacity of this suggestion! ;)

Expand full comment

Sadly, I feel like we're moving in the direction where people are going to drop the keyboard and pick up the gun instead. This much rage can't be pent up for long without something breaking.

Expand full comment
Sep 23, 2021Liked by Erik Kain

As one of his constituents, I can help you understand Rep. Cawthorn. He's a blowhard rich-kid whose never had to do an honest day's work in his life and a racist. And not in the sense that term gets bandied about in the media these days- I mean in the sense where he boasts about "going conquistador" on Hispanics (for context, he was referring to buying out a Mexican restaurant in his hometown to use as the office for his on-paper-only realtor business)and refers to Hitler as "the Fuhrer".

At best, he's cynically trying to play the situation for clout. At worst, he's in the front of the line at the punchbowl for kool-aid because he thinks it will let him turn his hometown into a sundown town somehow.

I normally try to be kind and charitable to others, so let my condemnation of Cawthorn speak deeply regarding the depths of his ignominy among a large section of his community.

Expand full comment
Sep 23, 2021Liked by Erik Kain

Ah, my apologies, I see you've already acknowledged this. Mea culpa.

Expand full comment
author

Not at all, I'm glad to hear from someone in his district. That's what I suspected but it's good to have confirmation. Too bad actual racists can so easily take cover amidst all the racism claims being tossed around these days...

Expand full comment

The man wasn't even subtle about it: one of his big online attack ads against his opponent was, and I kid you not, that he worked for "non-white males", which he explicitly framed as a betrayal of his "white male constituency". I can't recall if this included an EXPLICIT promise to stack his office and any positions he had power over with white men, but it's certainly not a wild flight of reasoning to read that into his attitudes regarding race.

This is why I'm always opposed to lumping people who aren't perfectly up-to-date and compliant with whatever the current progressive orthodoxy on race is into the "racist" camp- it cheapens the term to the point that someone who openly displays contempt for non-whites and sees them as the white man's lesser can hold public office, with any outcry ignored by a wider public suffering from racism-accusation-fatigue.

Expand full comment
Sep 24, 2021Liked by Erik Kain

As always, well thought out and reasoned. What is wild is I always fancied myself more conservative but with how you describe leftism I find that maybe I was wrong because I identify with all that. So maybe I’m more left than I originally thought, which is kind of a shame because of how horrible the new left is and I really want less than 0 association with it.

Expand full comment
author

I think the dividing lines between "conservative" and "liberal" or "right" and "left" are often, at least to some degree, manufactured, or at least our differences are hyper-acknowledged rather than finding ways we are alike. Not that I think the left and right are the same, only that I think opportunistic bastards often try to stoke the flames of our differences to benefit themselves and their power. We need a movement for the people, the working people, that emphasizes our similarities (mainly that we are all human, we are workers of various stripes, we only have power if we work together to balance out the power of the super-rich and politically connected etc.)

Expand full comment

I could not agree more with everything you’ve said here. I think for me it just took age, maturity, and wisdom to come to that conclusion. Not that I’m an old man, but I feel like a lot of people in their mid-thirties that I know are all beginning to reach similar conclusions.

Expand full comment
Sep 24, 2021Liked by Erik Kain

I do like the "don't mess with our cubs" line, though. That's a keeper.

Expand full comment
author

Haha yeah. Makes me think of the Jungle Book.

Expand full comment

I love the left, the fuck you left that mistrusts all institutions and politicians—the state, the media, the corporations, the easy answers, the censors, the warmongers, the bigots.

Great post, As usual you are able to sum up everything I`m thinking with fantastic prose.

So happy to have a reasonable voice that doesn`t have to follow a group in this industry.

Expand full comment