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You’re Wrong!
Because One of Us Has To Be, and I Know It’s Not Me.
It sucks being wrong. There’s not a person alive who enjoys it, I’d wager. No matter how enlightened we may strive to be, we all prefer the satisfying feeling of being correct while others are in error. It’s a harmful tendency, this desire to be right, and it hurts more than just the stubborn individuals who embrace this mindset. Lately, I see it directed at marginalized and at-risk communities, usually perpetrated by the folks who are already sitting pretty comfortably in control. Conservative legislators in Arkansas, for example, deciding which medical treatments should be available to transgender youth, simply because they (mostly white, mostly Christian, mostly straight, mostly males) have decided these treatments are wrong. I can’t see this group of folks responding well if told the way they live their lives is wrong, so much so that their rights are going to be legislated away, but the smug comfortableness with which they strip others of their rights is startling and disappointing.
I’ve been trying to imagine what this group of legislators would say if the tables were turned, and some government officials were trying to make something they hold dear illegal or inaccessible. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that we were trying to make it illegal to take children to Church service. Religion, like medical care, is widely understood in this country to be something we citizens have a right to, so it’s pretty easy to picture that religious people would protest, saying it’s up to the parent to decide whether a child should be exposed to church. It’s a matter of personal freedom and personal choice, they’d say, and it is vast governmental overreach to write laws limiting or revoking these freedoms. And they’d be exactly right.
But they don’t see it when they are doing the exact same thing to a group they don’t care for and with whom they do not identify.
When I was a college student more than 25 years ago, I once tangled bike tires with another student while we were both riding the narrow bike path on campus. She fell down, and I almost did.
In college, I worked 30+ hours a week in order to be able to afford, with the assistance of my student loans, a small one room efficiency over a garage, behind my landlord’s house 6 blocks from campus. I didn’t…
