Sunday, June 19, 2016

The More Hostile E-Mail I Get from People Self-Identifying as Left-Leaning [You Know, the People with Whom I Have Spent Most of My Life] Who Blame Me and My Parish for Orlando, the More I'm Beginning to Think This is True

Especially the Christian part.

In the wake of the San Bernardino shooting, the actor Samuel L. Jackson said that he hoped it would turn out that the killer was a white man. David Sirota wrote the same thing after the Boston marathon bombing, in an article headlined “Let’s hope the Boston marathon bomber is a white American.” Jackson and Sirota were disappointed....

[The] Left...prefers that its enemies be white, male, Christian, and, if possible, middle-aged, middle-American, and overweight. Remember how, during the Tea Party rallies, so much attention was paid to the fact that some participants were obese and using mobility scooters? That wasn’t an accident. It’s loathing substituting for analysis. For much the same reason, cartoons purporting to depict gun-rights supporters after Orlando almost invariably depicted obese, aging, white, and downscale (rumpled, ill-kempt) subjects. That is whom the Left believes to be the problem when it comes to violence in these United States — and most other problems, too. The relevant psychology here is that of intellectual development arrested in adolescence. If you’ve ever heard a 50-year-old lefty raging about Middle America and thought that it sounded a lot like a 14-year-old raging about his stick-in-the-mud father, you’re not the first to whom that has occurred.

Episcopalians, both clergy and laity, who assume that I'm an Easterner often confess these sentiments in front of me without being aware that 1.) I'm a person whom they identify as an enemy of the people, since I'm from the wild culture of the "flyover country" and 2.) I take some quiet umbrage at their labeling, class-bigotry, and condescension.