For at least a decade we have been told that this and that and the other thing must be tolerated in pursuit of the elusive vote of the worki
Rebecca Fucking Solnit. She gets me every time.
Favorite bits:
1) On the one hand most of those in the USA who could be described as working class are neither white nor male, and on the other those who are telling us that the Hunt for the Working Class must take priority over all else tend to be middle-class white men when they're telling us we must give up our commitment to other issues – women's rights, racial justice, immigrant rights, climate action.
2) God knows there was troubling information enough about [Platner] who was made up entirely of red flags and white male fantasy [...].
3) But Jesus said ["Let him without sin cast the first stone"] while preventing a crowd from stoning to death a woman accused of adultery, aka taking a stand against violence against women.
4) [W]omen's rights are very important to progressive men, just not as important as anything else.
And don't miss this absolute banger:
As sociologist and New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom put it last October, "Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class." Cottom is a Black woman; Black women are the single most loyal constituency of the party, the ones who vote for it in the highest numbers, but I have never heard similar arguments about how we must bend to their needs no matter what. She continues, "Our culture is built to eternally forgive men, generally, and white men of means, especially, for their mistakes. Every single time, they were young and immature and it would be a shame to hold them accountable for anything they did wrong."
or this one:
PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder – has been cited, including by Platner, as a justification for his post-military conduct. On the one hand, while it may explain it, it doesn't justify that behavior in a candidate for senate. On the other, another Marine who served in Iraq, David J. Morris, who wrote a powerful book, The Evil Hours, about PTSD, wrote me some years ago, “The science on the subject is prettyclear: according to the New England Journal of Medicine, rape is about four times more likely to result in diagnosable PTSD than combat. Think about that for a moment— being raped is four times more psychologically disturbing than going off to a war and being shot at and blown up. And because there are currently no enduring cultural narratives that allow women to look upon their survival as somehow heroic or honorable, the potential for enduring damage is even greater.” A significant percentage of American women are survivors of male violence, including intimate partner violence and rape, yet I rarely hear PTSD invoked to justify or excuse their – our – behavior, and I've never heard it invoked to justify violence by women.
