Pizza Diavola

Yesterday, Misty said,

[P]rinciples aren’t reserved just for people we like, agree with, and would “do for us” in kind. This concept? Not hard. 

My rule of thumb lately has been that if you can abandon them when it’s convenient, they’re not principles.

I get that it’s appealing to pick up the nasty, poisoned barbs of sexism, classism, racism, and ableism and revel in using them freely because the target is one of those people. Someone you don’t like, someone who is considered an acceptable victim, someone who came at you with those same weapons in the past. After being attacked with those tactics, it feels positively heady to pick up those slurs and aim them at someone else. This is what power feels like! This is what it feels like to be the aggressor and in control, rather than the victim!

Unfortunately, principles are a code of behavior that you stick to when it’s inconvenient, when it’s hard, when it’s not fun and even when it means you’re ceding the easy ways to attack people. It doesn’t matter whether the people you’re standing up for are friends or enemies, whether they agree with you, or whether they’d return the favor, because principles are not about them. They’re about you and how you hold yourself accountable. That was one of the most difficult lessons of my life because I struggled against learning it. I still have to fight the temptation to use prejudiced slurs because the damned things are effective. They work because they’re words loaded with histories of hatred and although I know better, I still have to work to avoid shaming myself and falling prey to the ease and effectiveness of hateful speech. It gets easier with time and practice.

Oddly enough, maybe that’s my Christian background turning out to be useful. We were taught that salvation was not easy, that following Christ was not easy. If we wanted to be His and live Christian lives, we’d have to struggle and work at it every day, fully aware that we’d fail time and again. We’d never be perfect but we’d pick ourselves up after every failure and keep on going, striving to do better.

In the end, resorting to sexist, racist, classist, ageist, and ableist weapons only serves to legitimize those tactics in all instances. Using them means that even if you win the immediate conflict, you’re succumbing to bigotry and hatred. Those slurs are never ok, even if you think that it’ll be just in this instance…just against this woman…just because we’re so close…just because he called me a g**k first…just because it would hurt them badly…just this once and then you’ll go back to being a good progressive and standing up against prejudice, except for right now…

As the election season moves forward, I’m wondering how many progressives will be left by the end of it.