June 13, 2020: Things That Make Me Wonder -
Yesterday, as you no doubt know, the Trump bullies moved to
strip legal protections from transgender people who need health care. And - as
you no doubt also know – that means they did it on the fourth anniversary of
the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Las Vegas, a gathering place for the queer
community. I wondered if they are so vanilla, straight, right-wing, insulated, shambolic, and obtuse that none of them had grieved over the Pulse shooting, or
noted the date - and then I thought No, of course they knew. They have a
scheduler who decides when to drop bombs for maximum damage. (Well, June is
Pride month, so that’s a given, but the very worst date in June would be June
12th! Let’s do it then!)
There was also a big rally that just happened to be scheduled for Tulsa, for Juneteenth, which could have been a similar blunder if absolutely no one on the Trump team is black or knows anything about black history or cares. But ignorance seems unlikely. It’s their evil scheduler again, trying for maximum damage.
Maybe at the
beginning of every year, there’s a big planning session – here are terrible
things we want to do to marginalized people, to minorities, to immigrants, to
refugees and their children, to workers, to the environment, okay great, that’s
the list, send it over to Phil so he can look at all the holidays and
anniversaries of tragedies and decide when we will announce each one! (It’s
strange that at midnight, the decision was made to reschedule for June 20th,
but by then they’d captured the news cycle on Friday, and maybe that – as well
as the cruelty – was the point.)
Thinking how there must be a maximum-damage-scheduling-wizard
somewhere in the administration got me pondering gratuitous cruelty and
gratuitous insults, and then … gratuities! A gratuity is a tip, right? A little
something above and beyond the fare? An extra. And gratuitous cruelty is extra
too! I shall be cruel to you and ALSO, I
shall do it on a day that is already pretty emotionally freighted. I shall
knock you down, and then I shall KICK you when you are down. Here – this is for
you! (Hey, guys, Phil just had a genius idea: how about a Second Amendment-themed
rally with some NRA types -- at Sandy Hook on the anniversary of the shooting
of school kids!)
Here’s another thing I hadn’t thought of: A young friend of
mine lives and works in one of our Southern states that reopened a while back, where
COVID-19 case counts are going up.
His boss recently told all staff that there was a big event on
the horizon, where they’d be working closely with customers one on one, and
that no one was to wear a mask because (paraphrase) seeing people in masks
makes the customers uncomfortable.
I don’t know why this came as such a surprise to me. I
suppose, if a private company like my favorite grocery store can have a policy
that everyone coming in must have a mask on, then presumably a different
private company can forbid anyone to wear a mask. Maybe it’s much like a dress
code policy? I can’t quite get my head around it, honestly, which is no doubt a
huge failure of imagination on my part. I don’t know if anyone in the company will
push back. But I know that if nothing else, wearing a mask there is simply not
the Done Thing.
You probably saw the little video on Twitter back in May, where a woman berates a reporter for wearing a mask, accusing her of “terrifying the general public.” It’s pretty awful, and you really don’t need to watch, but here it is if you feel compelled: https://twitter.com/i/status/1256268361928978432
What struck me at the time was that whether
or not the general public is terrified, the berating woman sure is. The fact
that she is not compelled to wear a mask does not calm her. She is entirely
freaked out that somebody else is wearing one.
She should definitely go to the big event coming up at my
young friend’s company! She will love it!
Meanwhile, back here on the Left Coast, the opposite - our governor put Oregon on pause for an extra week, because COVID-19 case
counts are going up. Some people don’t like Governor Brown, for various
reasons, but I believe one reason Oregon has been hit lightly by the pandemic until
now is that she looked at Washington and California, and put us on Shelter in
Place early. I think she did well by us.
But one segment of my Facebook friend group descended into Brown-bashing
yesterday because they felt she had Not Done Enough. No, the folks on this
particular thread agreed, she should have made face masks mandatory. She had
not used enough authority in this public health crisis.
Usually I don’t do Facebook debates. But these were all goodhearted
little old liberal humans who I generally agree with, and I thought maybe they
hadn’t heard the counterarguments. So I mentioned that I’d read about a request
from some of our local leaders who had ASKED Governor Brown please NOT to make
a law about wearing facemasks, because they were concerned that our police
might use that law as an excuse to pull over, harass, or bedevil people of
color.
When I think of people who “should” be fined or arrested or somehow sanctioned for not wearing masks, I envision that a mandatory mask law could protect ME and my crew from conservative white people - like the lady berator who is so angry and scared in the video, or like people who disavow science and medicine as some sort of lifestyle-political faith statement, or like the boss of my young friend, or like those folks who showed up with guns at various statehouses to make a fuss about their right to be maskless. Those are the people who make ME jumpy.
I don’t think first about how any law can be selectively enforced or how the enforcers might just give all those scary white people a pass, and instead use the law to bully people of color, whether they were wearing masks or not. Rip the mask off and claim the person wasn’t wearing one! Done! But of course, that could happen. Unintended consequences can be as bad as Phil-the-evil-scheduler.
(Sign on Mt. Tabor, something else I don't really understand....)
RE the scheduler: This reminds me of how long it took the media to call obvious lies by Dotard and his critters (e.g., Kellyanne) lies. For a couple of years they did this little dance in which they called them "false statements" or "seemingly untrue assertions" or some such instead of "lies" because we can't possibly know his intentions and for it to be a LIE he would have to know it's untrue. It didn't matter that he repeated, over and over, things that had been publicly proven to be untrue numerous. If he remained ignorant of the falseness of his statements, it was a willful ignorance. And so it matters that they are not just misstatements or untruths but LIES. It matters that, decades later, Dotard stands behind his call to (essentially) lynch the Central Park Five (who were exonerated by DNA) because it is screaming evidence of the racism at the core of his being and a clear indication that racism and tormenting of the vulnerable in general would be the cornerstone of his administration should he be elected. Reporters should have been demanding in 2015 and '16 that he retract ad apologize for his call to lynch the Central Park Five. They should at the very least have taken his refusal to do so as an indication that his false assertions are *knowingly* false and therefore should always be assumed to be intentional - i.e., lies. You don't give the benefit of the doubt to a proven liar. You don't assume false statements are a mistake - you should assume they're intentional because the best evidence supports that conclusion.
ReplyDeleteJust as timing his discrimination against transgender people for the anniversary of the Pulse shooting was intentional. Just as scheduling his racist rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth was intentional. His lies, his cruelty, his inhumanity - all of it is *intentional*.
I think you may be hinting that I was slow to catch on to Phil the Evil Scheduler. I accept this charge.
ReplyDelete