To be genuinely offended becomes more difficult in an age when every daily flutter of news presents a new outrage. Social media vibrates with a fresh grievance, each time inuring one to the last.
It happens every day. The self-appointed victim grazes upon something innocuous, and debones its substance. They then cast the offender as “vile.” Tell us all, with rheumy eyes, how their every sinew has been violated.
Unless you’re of the progressive thought-pool, the farming of grievance sows a fallow seed.
So, when a Labour Party candidate for the upcoming European election rapped my door last Sunday, an alien feeling colored my cheeks.
“Hello, I’m here to ask for your vote for the upcoming . . .”
I cut her dead. Leached of her early buoyancy, that cartoonish simper rigidly upheld.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m voting for the Brexit Party.”
What came next was almost inscrutable.
Having heard the word “Brexit” unfattened with derision, or the customary jibes upon the apparent intellectual deficit of Brexit voters, my visitor sprung into concealed joy.
“Oh!” she said. “That referendum was actually three years ago.” Her forehead knitted, sure of an intellectual supremacy. “This vote is actually for the European Parliament.”
Now, unless one has drowsed the last three years cocooned in a cylinder of wax, the news that Brexit happened three years ago shouldn’t surprise.
Indeed, in my visitor’s mind at least, I’d somehow missed the most substantial political event in our recent history. Despite it being the subject of every news broadcast, splashed across every newspaper. Brexit has tinged every loose ribbon of pub chatter.
Not one for offense-farming, I invited my new friend to enjoy next week’s de facto second referendum, and the mentally insolvent louse of a leader to which her Labour Party currently depraves itself.
What she was asking for should be the true absurdity. Labour, once a party of working men and women, is now commandeered by those who call themselves “progressive.”
The old Labour heartlands voted for Brexit. Nevertheless, she wanted another referendum to make sure the proles understood what they were voting for.
Worse yet, these are elections to which she doesn’t even think we should be privy. We voted to leave. But the impressively hapless Tory Prime Minister Theresa May has ensured we will now partake.
Perhaps, my visitor was feeling a little strange. That can happen. Perhaps she recently imbibed the fatuous slacktivism of Alyssa Milano, an actress and “activist.”
Milano last week called for a sex strike. She’s demanding that women everywhere abstain from sex. This is because some other undesirables used their democratic right to vote for something Milano doesn’t agree with.
To protest a new abortion law in the state of Georgia, Milano took to the digital asylum known as Twitter.
“Until women have legal control over our own bodies, we just cannot risk pregnancy,” she tweeted.
Notice the collective pronoun “we.” Progressives, especially of the celebrity breed, indulge that word whenever they need to make a point that stretches regrettably beyond their own world of me-me-me.
The reaction was unedifying. A columnist in Twitter’s print edition, The Guardian, said Milano’s doctrine didn’t go far enough. Not only should women withhold sex, they should “down tools” and stop doing anything.
Suzanne Moore, the columnist, also indulges upon the “we” when it suits her—usually when she needs a mass sacrifice to gloss her own narcissistic whims.
“If we women want to assert our right to bodily autonomy and our economic worth, let’s stop,” she writes. “Just stop. Do not pick up the kids from school. Do not put the washing on. Do not smile at that man because he is making you nervous. Do not buy the birthday presents. Stop caring, in other words.”
I’m not entirely sure how anyone—male or female—could expect to get paid for undertaking life’s day-to-days.
But what is interesting is the horrifically “patriarchal” society that Moore, and Milano depict.
To them, women have sex solely to appease men. In return for a security, financial or otherwise. To them, sex is a commodity. Women are mere brokers within a sexual market marauded by plundering male satyrs bent upon one thing.
Such twaddle is, of course, sexist. In reality—a place with which neither Moore or Milano is acquainted—things are rather different.
But this is what progressives need others to believe. Without a confected injustice, progressives have nothing against which to wage their moral crusades. Without menace, without power.
By fashioning themselves as swords of justice, progressives need a constant stream of enemies to puncture.
These enemies were once legitimate. Race relations since the 1960s have improved beyond recognition. Nobody needs to be told that. (Well, almost nobody.) And the status of modern women needs no lesson in history. Neither victory exclusive to our selfless saviors.
But progressives cannot afford to win. Newborn injustices, a runaway list of -isms and -phobias, serve as the placenta upon which their narcissism feeds. It is cultish in substance. Here is the problem, we are the solution.
Despite all obvious progression, women must therefore remain oppressed. Minorities, too. At least until progressives have measureless control to soothe their every insecurity.
And therein steeps their problem. In an America full of female CEOs, an America that twice elected a black president, legitimate enemies are vanishingly few.
But that doesn’t matter. My visitor, had I not slammed the door to a smattering of keys, would have been all too keen to espouse upon her latest boogeyman.
Nigel Farage, “Mr. Brexit” to Americans, is currently leading the Brexit Party. In barely three months, the Brexit Party has surged to 100,000 paid members, which is why the party is set to win next week’s European Parliament elections—soaking up more than the Labour and Conservative vote, combined.
Indeed, Farage held a rally near my hometown earlier this week. Thousands clotted to hear the ex-Conservative speak. This is in a town where Labour weighs, rather than counts, its votes: Merthyr Tydfil, where the “c-word” is not four-lettered, yet vastly more offensive.
Something wild is stirring. As my Labour visitor will soon find out.
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