clean up your memes and examine your values

A meme, passionately expressed, is undone when it's been written by a retard. Bad grammar and mechanics can suck the dignity right out of a meme, and this often happens because people who create memes tend to be, for the most part, functionally illiterate. You're not helping your own cause, guys!

So below is a meme that I thought expressed a passionate sentiment (not one I totally agree with), but which is completely undone, in dignity, by the obvious lack of care that went into respecting the English language. After you look at this poorly punctuated meme, scroll down a bit and see how I've cleaned it up to restore some of its dignity. Then scroll down again to see my discussion of the meme—where I agree and disagree with it.

The bad meme as originally found:

The cleaned-up meme:

It's the sort of sentiment that might be expressed by a gentle-tempered soul who is now about to go to war. I'm coming around to the idea that civil war in America has been brewing for some time, and while I would never want to see such a war, I don't know what can be done to stop it, especially with the loud left pushing the quieter right's buttons so hard and so relentlessly (2020 riots? election shenanigans? constant hijacking and repurposing of language?). What I now predict is this: the right will one day explode, and there will be bloody and widespread violence that will turn into a great purge as elements of the left are all hunted down and destroyed or at least driven far, far underground (see my piece on remainders to understand why I think you can never stamp such things out). The right, after all, has most of the guns, so a true civil war can end only one way, but the left seems unable to stop itself from tempting fate. Meanwhile, I expect the left to respond to this explosion of violence with a predictably triumphant last gasp: "Now, we see the violence inherent in the system!" The right was violent all along! It's the same way a bad student gets the teacher's goat.

Having said that, and despite sympathizing with the overall sentiment expressed in the above meme, i.e., that the left has done nothing but provoke and provoke, here are some points in the meme that I disagree with. 

Take the notion of "shoving" gayness "down my throat." Does a gay-pride parade count as "shoving teh gay down someone's throat"? Personally, I couldn't care less about such a parade. Let gay folks celebrate themselves! Let them engage in public displays of affection! How does any of that harm me in any way? Tolerance is about giving others breathing room to live as they want, and as long as the gay community isn't handing out flyers saying, "You should convert to our lifestyle," I really couldn't care less how the gay community handles itself. If we expand that argument, I'd say the same is true for expressions of racial and ethnic pride—as long as such expressions don't involve the denigration of other people. Living together in peace and tolerance isn't that hard, when you get down to it. You stay out of my business, and I'll stay out of yours. That's a libertarian sentiment I can get behind.

The "political affiliation" remark is also problematic. If you listen to rightie discourse, a lot of it is about how leftism is an active threat to one's lifestyle. As I continue to listen to Matt Walsh (who attracts and repels me), I can see, on the one hand, why the right might feel threatened, but I can also see plenty of rightie intolerance gathering momentum and expressing itself in ways that sound quite similar to the language of the left. Of course (and for once, my Master's degree might be relevant here), the situation is made sticky by the presence of values. Properly speaking, if I have certain values, then for them to truly be values, they have to apply to more than just me: they have to apply to everyone. Values and truth-claims are hegemonic. There is no "my truth," and moral relativism is incoherent. If, as a Christian, I say that Christ died for your sins, then that metaphysic is meant to apply to all of sinning humanity, not just to fellow Christians. If, as a Buddhist, I say we are karmically trapped in a samsaric cycle of existence because of our ignorance of the true nature of reality, which is emptiness (sunyata), that sentiment is supposed to apply to all reality, not merely to wherever Buddhists live. As mentioned, values, like truth-claims, are inherently hegemonic: if I hold a particular value, it's a value because it applies not only to me, but also to you. This is one reason why I despair of this problem ever going away. As long as there are different values, there will always be conflict, so maybe I should take back what I said above about how easy it should be to live together in peace and tolerance. It's actually not so easy.

But that brings us back to tolerance which, as a value, occupies a weird sort of space in the axiological field. Tolerance is the metavalue that says we need to reign in our other values, to make space for other perspectives and allow for their flourishing. Maybe I believe Christ died for your sins, and maybe it's okay for me to proclaim that proudly without actually pressuring anyone to convert, but being tolerant means I can go no further than that. The problem, of course, is the one mentioned above: the hegemony of values. Quite frankly, I don't know what the answer to this riddle is. Christians often market their faith because, per the Great Commission at the end of the gospel of Matthew, they're supposed to do so—and not merely to market and proclaim, but also to "[baptize people] in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." You see the pickle we're in? Christians who follow such values can't leave other people alone. Buddhists, meanwhile, don't proselytize that openly, but they do arrive in foreign climates, quietly set up temples, and let the people come to them. Muslims market aggressively (I'm perfectly aware that most adherents of all these traditions will resent the way I'm using the term marketing), and while Jews might prefer to keep to themselves, even they feel a great obligation to at least maintain their communities.

And the tumultuous political arena really isn't all that different. If you're a climate alarmist, for example, you want everyone to know the earth isn't going to last more than a decade: spread the news far and wide! Danger! If you're a leftist fighting perceived white supremacy, you're morally obligated to get out there in the trenches, doing your best to convert minds and hearts. And this, again, is why I despair of our ever arriving at a peaceful solution to the current dilemma, the current cultural strife. Even if, like the Jews, the right simply wants to be left alone, the pressure coming from the left will, sooner or later, force the right to resist if only to maintain its borders. Open conflict seems inevitable.

All that said, and back to my main point, I don't completely agree with the details of the sentiment expressed in the above meme, but I agree with it on the macro-level: the left has indeed been pushing and provoking, and as Langston Hughes suggested in his poem about a very different era and conflict, things might explode. This will not end well.