Being up north, as frustrating as it can be at times (family, am I right?), always leaves me introspective, and as we wound back down highway 11 toward home, I could help but think:

Has chastising someone for saying something politically incorrect ever actually worked?

My mom said Indian; my sister-in-law barked INDIGENOUS at her, with vitriol, like my mother was some raging bigot who wasn’t just stuck in the habit of saying Indian for over seventy years.

I see this all the time online and every time, I think, and you wonder why people radicalize away from you?

One could say, “I think they go by indigenous now,” in a nice, non-condescending tone, thereby sparking a conversation and education that ends amicably with at least one party elevated with an updated viewpoint, to hopefully, do better the next time around. If that party still resists at that point, and won’t listen to an updated viewpoint, well, then, yeah, okay. Maybe you got a bigot.

But most people aren’t that bad, and by escalating so quickly, and implying that they are horrible people right off the hop, well, you’re invalidating everything they are in favour of a label of bigot, fascist, whatever other horrible thing you’d like to use, over something that more often than not, is more micro than macro-aggression.

Think of it like this: you probably don’t think you’re a bad person. You likely don’t think you’re perfect, you might even think of yourself as being flawed or broken or screwed-up, but you probably don’t think you’re evil. You might think you make everyone’s lives worse, but that’s because you’re a fuck-up who can’t get their shit together, and not because you’re, you know, Hitler.

But let’s say one day that you use the word (and let’s keep it kind of ridiculous here) “ginger”.

And maybe a family member immediately turns to you and escalates, labelling you an absolute bigot, and telling that they go by “rouged” now, and that using ginger makes you a horrible racist and probably supportive of all the anti-trans, homophobic, sexist nonsense out there, and a Republican while you’re at it.

Now, you, even thinking you’re kind of a loser, probably don’t think that of yourself. And so, how do you respond?

Like pretty well everyone does when they feel they’ve been unjustly accused – defensively.

You get your back up. You get defensive because this person is trying to invalidate all the good parts of you, that no matter how screwed up you are, at your core, you know you’re not that, not EVIL, and reduce you down to this one thing – rougephobic.

And with that, all the other nonsense that gets conflated with one level of bigotry. If you’re transphobic, you must be anti-gay as well. You must hate lesbians and black people and Latinos and women. If you’re a women, you must be a TERF and probably pro-life as well.

Of course, you know you’re not that, so even if you don’t say it out loud, you push back. You internalize your indignation and all of a sudden, all these disingenuous assholes talking about the elitist left looking down their nose at you, start making a bit more sense. And you’re sucked in, a little more each time it happens, until you’re a full blown Trumper (I mean, hopefully not that far, but imagine this isn’t just one person doing this to you – it’s a million people, a literal million, in some cases, online, constantly, without cease. How far down the rabbit hole might you go in your anger at being unjustly labelled Evil).

And all this is knowing that if they’d just said, “I think they go by rouged now” in an informative and non-judgmental way, sparking a brief, but important conversation, you might have avoided any of that, avoided the defensive trigger response and even possibly, gained an ally.

Education, not condemnation. These are the keys to winning back those on the edge, those that just maybe need a little bit of knowledge, rather than vilification.

These are the things I think about as I drive.

And they’re the things that are killing the left – why we get smaller every day, while the lunatics swell in size.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1256 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Hammered, Elizabeth Bear
Comics: A Righteous Thirst For Vengeance 10, Deadly Class 54-55, The Scumbag 14
Music: The Warrior's Code, Dropkick Murphys