Last week, at a concert, an amiable parking lot attendant thanked us for being more pleasant to deal with than his previous customer. He offered no details, but it was easy enough to figure out what had happened. The parking fee had gone up to ten dollars, admittedly a rather stiff fee for parking a car, and the previous driver had thrown the kind of childish tantrum with which we have become all too familiar in the Trump and post-Trump era, the kind for which the former president himself has repeatedly provided a more than adequate model. Outbursts of angry aggression, whether online or up close and personal, are now commonplace, sometimes rising to the intensity of raw hatred. Within the same week, J.K. Rowling said that she had received threats of death and rape because of her opinions about trans people. Even if one does not agree with Rowling’s views, and I don’t insofar as I can figure out what they are from her murky expressions of them, let’s think about what is going on here: the response to someone’s perceived lack of compassion towards her fellow human beings is—rape and death? To a shocking degree, our society has normalized hate—all the more shocking in this case because those threats clearly, given their object, could not have come from far-right extremists.
May 6, 2022
May 6, 2022
May 6, 2022
Last week, at a concert, an amiable parking lot attendant thanked us for being more pleasant to deal with than his previous customer. He offered no details, but it was easy enough to figure out what had happened. The parking fee had gone up to ten dollars, admittedly a rather stiff fee for parking a car, and the previous driver had thrown the kind of childish tantrum with which we have become all too familiar in the Trump and post-Trump era, the kind for which the former president himself has repeatedly provided a more than adequate model. Outbursts of angry aggression, whether online or up close and personal, are now commonplace, sometimes rising to the intensity of raw hatred. Within the same week, J.K. Rowling said that she had received threats of death and rape because of her opinions about trans people. Even if one does not agree with Rowling’s views, and I don’t insofar as I can figure out what they are from her murky expressions of them, let’s think about what is going on here: the response to someone’s perceived lack of compassion towards her fellow human beings is—rape and death? To a shocking degree, our society has normalized hate—all the more shocking in this case because those threats clearly, given their object, could not have come from far-right extremists.