  this weekend i was witness to what i want to call an "event. " i went to a concert at which i was clearly in the minority. a rather poor generalization: the band, feminist lesbians; the crowd, mostly young, homosexual chicks; me, heterosexual male. you see, i was a minority. and being a minority is a fine thing. i am lucky, though.
one of the majority. one of the favorable types...white, middle class, college educated, christian, heterosexual, male. i get all the social "perks" that come with the territory. so, being forced to be a minority in a particular situation is, well, in a way, refreshing. differs my perspective. makes me realize my luck.
gives me the chance to see what it might be like to be marginalized. i need that. i need to know that. to be fair. to have a fair view of everything. to know what kind of world i live in.
problem: one presenter, a self-proclaimed radical feminist, on stage, before the main act, spouting off about vaginas and their power. spouting off about being a lesbian feminist. fine. but also, inflammatory, angry, projecting a certain, well, hatred for males, specifically white males. was i scared? no.
was i shocked? not really. things i have read or heard before really. then why my negative reaction to it? well. first, i share urlLink her response to it.
click urlLink here to read urlLink her assessment. but, secondly, something more frightening. problem with this sort of display is not necessarily the anger. anger is good. problem is not necessarily the fervor. fervor is good.
problem is the inflammatory language. it is empty. it does not have anything to justify itself. is a build up of words without, well, argument. it is without well-posited, discipline, careful construction. what she presented were words, words designed not to reason, not to construct logic, but designed, instead, to enrage, anger, incite a kind of violence, if in thought only.
what one can deduce from it is that the movement, if we can call it that, has taken upon itself the ideal that to fight the imbalance in society, one must inflame to the point of hatred. this movement suggests that the way to defeat what it finds wrong, it must adopt the inflammatory ideal of reverse bigotry. that to fight bigotry, one must be a bigot. there is a logical problem with that, clearly. probably what troubles me most about those kinds of things. i admire those who fight for social justice.
for equality. i do not admire bigots. whether white or black. male or female. gay or straight. bigots misrepresent, and do an injustice to, the causes for which they try to fight.
they damage causes. they do not help them. what's more, there is no arguing or debating with such people. they worship their words so assuredly that, despite your pleadings, they will not deviate from their hard, coarse line of thought. their empty words. same with the fundamentalist religious as well.
they cannot be wrong if everyone else is wrong...so they think. ignore them and they scream louder. if they scream louder, ignore them even more. they cannot thrive being ignored. so i ignore them. 
