Measles, Global Warming, Generation X tolerance and me …

A sobering truth is that an underlying attitude of my generation, that all opinions are valid, has taken on a weird life away from what it meant when I learned this ethos. When I learned it, the idea was in recognition of the primacy of the opinions of members of the white patriarchy, versus the lack of value placed in the educated opinions and lived experience of black women and other women of color, the LGBTQ community, women in general, all black people and other people of color, of so many people. But we accepted this weird idea of fairness, and adopted things like, “if you make fun of X you have to make fun of everybody,” and other ideas.

We became too tolerant of racism, sexism, homophobia and nonsense. Our ideas of validating all points of view, arguably to help neutralize the regressive nonsense of white supremacists (like the one who left a scar in my head) ended up facilitating their ideas, because too much of our small generation remained white and patriarchal. There was a refusal to stand up to this. So, I saw a lot of people of my generation play with ideas like “ironic racism” where the tropes, symbols and language of white patriarchy were displayed “ironically” to elicit laughs and reactions. It never seemed to occur to younger people then that when you say something racist “ironically” you’re still speaking something racist into existence. So many people in our generation took it as a virtue to be friends with “all kinds of people” which meant if you were friends with Nazis AND knew a Latino person…