Fright N–Ooh, Yum

So, there’s a new trailer out for the remake of Fright Night. It is being passed around because it stars David Tennant’s bare chest.

The passing around prompted Dana to ask, “Does retweeting that David Tennant thing make us sexist pigs?”

Because I live to answer these questions and make these distinctions between sex and sexism, I answered, “As long as we don’t feel entitled to it, I think we’re okay in appreciating it.”

So please, enjoy. Things like this should not be wasted.

Fright N–Ooh, Yum
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Prudes and Prisons

After a night without internet, I finally got to catch up on the Weiner “scandal” this morning. All the reaction I had time before work was summed up in three Tweets:

  • Yeah, I’m a bit ticked at Weiner. Mostly for labeling his premarital sexting as “inappropriate.”
  • As for his postmarital sexting? Only his wife can say. And I’m certainly not going to put her on the spot to find out.
  • In other news, has Ginny issued a public apology to Clarence yet for her inappropriate lobbying?

I meant to write a whole blog post about the subject tonight, but Amanda Marcotte has already written it.

Against prudery

I don’t want to keep hammering at this, but here’s a link to my Alternet piece on why I’m so concerned about this whole Anthony Weiner scandal. I won’t revisit it at length here; please read the article. My biggest problem is that the pretense of public interest was completely abandoned, and this was just a matter of the “ick factor“. Now that this door is open, and simply making people uncomfortable is considered reason enough to condemn someone and demand their resignation, I’m really worried. My gut feeling on this is that Weinergate really is confirmation of a suspicion I’ve had for awhile that America has quietly become more prudish in the past few years, and this is a very bad thing.

[…]

Silly, and unfortunately dangerous, as recent events demonstrate. Because it’s one thing not to be sexually adventurous, but quite another to sit in judgment of people whose sexual curiosities ick you out, whether done out of meanness or defensiveness. And lately, I’ve just generally noticed a trend towards more openly bashing people for seeking pleasure, even and often especially if they harm no one else in doing so.

Read the whole thing. Really. All of it. Chances are good Marcotte brings up at least one thing you haven’t considered as a mark of prudery, and that she makes a good case for it.

There’s also an echo in her post of a Facebook conversation with a friend of mine about a week ago. My friend started it off with this:

The queer movement spent decades trying to convince people that we should be taken seriously because we posed a real threat to the status quo. Now we spend all our time trying to convince everyone that we don’t pose any threat to anything, so the right should stop picking on us, already! I am of the whiplash generation of lesbians.

I will fight the marriage amendment with all my might because I believe that everyone has a right to marry, but I feel like, by getting us to spend all our time fighting for marriage and for open inclusion in the military, the right has recruited us to do the work of dismantling radical queerness for them.

I think she’s wrong about the recruitment. I think it’s more a question of discarding the people and tactics that have taken the gay rights movement as far as it’s come now that the gates appear to be in reach. But like my friend, I’ll fight with the crowd on individual rights issues. Otherwise? I’m hanging out with the drag queens. I’m talking to the leather girls. I’m having drinks with the sex educators and burlesque dancers and poly people.

Why? Because with the exception of a very few other people, these people are the ones who offer me freedom. These are the people who don’t care what is hiding in my email or DMs or with whom I flirt or how many inches of my cleavage or legs or anything else are visible. These are the people who understand the costs of arbitrary rules and who are stirring things up enough that we can figure out what is necessary (compassion and good communication) and what is arbitrary (almost everything else). These are the people capable of having the kinds of conversations that philosophy undergrads only dream of, many of which make it to this blog in one form or another.

So go read about prudery. Then go think about the costs of demanding that rights be granted only if something “isn’t a choice” or if the alternative is death or if granting the right won’t lead to granting another. Think about how narrow this box we’re asking for really is. No matter where you sleep, is that where you want to live?

Prudes and Prisons

Fallen Warriors

I’m just back from WisCon, held right next to Wisconsin’s capitol. We drove home through countryside dotted with military memorials made up of helicopters, tanks, and airplanes. Given that context, and the change happening in many parts of the world, it strikes me that there’s never been a better time to reprint my Memorial Day post from two years ago.

One of the things that struck me in travels through Scotland and the Canadian Maritimes was the monument in every town. Most of them were tiny, just a handful of names from each war–not because few died, but because the town was that small. The memorial at Edinburgh Castle, on the other hand, is of a scale and a simplistic majesty that imposes awe, a trick more church designers would like to have up their sleeves, I imagine.

Whatever the size, most memorials are central and public and impossible to overlook. That isn’t something we do well here. Monuments are destinations, traveled to on special occasions. Memorial Day is a single day of remembrance, Veterans Day, one more, and the rest of the time, our veterans are treated as disposable.

Some volunteered; others answered a call not of their choosing. They risked their lives and health for us. Many died. Worse yet, many killed. Many lost people who had become, in some ways, closer than kin. And we give them a day for those who lived and a day for those who died and maybe a little space out of the way.

We suck at remembering.

Fallen soldiers at least get a day, though. There are others who have fought and died for our society who don’t get that. Nor did they fight with the resources of our military or approval of our government behind them. I’m talking about the culture warriors.

It’s tempting to pretend that “culture war” is just a colorful turn of phrase. It isn’t. People have died every time our country has been persuaded to recognize the right of another group to be considered full human beings.

Workers died organizing unions. Women died claiming control of their own destinies. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, Jews, Irish, Italians, eastern Europeans–all have died insisting that no one people have a monopoly on humanity. Many people died for not keeping their sexuality or gender identity a secret. Others died because keeping that secret pushed them into shadows populated by predators.

They died because they challenged rules that were basely unfair. This made them outlaws in the eyes of many, stripped them of the protections we offer those who do not presume to transgress. This made them fair game, and they were hunted. Those who didn’t die rarely escaped without injury. No one offered them medals.

In the face of this, they persisted. Because of them, fewer of us are outlaws today. We can claim protection, imperfect as it is, that was won for us in the wars. Unlike many wars, these have made the world a better place.

So go out and enjoy that better world this weekend, but as you boat and picnic and enjoy family and friends, take a moment. Remember those soldiers whom we have promised to remember, and remember the others, who are too easily forgotten.

They fought for our freedom too.

Fallen Warriors

If You Don’t Stand Up for Us Today

“At the government teat.” Not only do anti-government legislators consider compassion to be a despicable virtue and caretaking a despicable act, but in the fight over health care in Texas, someone has produced flyers depicting them as that particularly female despicable act of breastfeeding. Rep. Senfronia Thompson, fed up with all the attacks on women in this session, isn’t going to take it quietly.

Why are people electing the douchebags who pass anti-woman legislation instead of more representatives like this?

If You Don’t Stand Up for Us Today

Sexism Always Wins, but It Still Loses

Jen McCreight won’t be talking about Boobquake at conferences anymore.

I’ve already said no to groups who wanted me to talk about it, and suggested another topic. I think we can learn interesting things from what happened, but I’m just sick of how people see it as a green light for sexual harassment. I can only tolerate so much.

In an otherwise decent post about the effects of pervasive sexism, Josh Rosenau asks:

Which raises the question: did sexism win, or was boobquake doomed precisely because it was meant to take advantage of society’s sexism?

Now, let me think about this for a–NO!

Or maybe I shouldn’t be quite so hasty. At least one commenter disagrees with me, saying, “Nobody could have predicted that! Except, of course, for everyone who did, and got shouted down as killjoys,” and, “You can’t solve a problem using the same thinking which created it.”

So, given that argument would my answer be any diff–NO!

To make a short story longer, let’s start with the second part of the statement. Boobquake was meant to take advantage of society’s sexism? It used the same thinking which created it? Boobquake was meant to be a joke, a joke that took one cleric’s claims that “immodest” dress led inevitably to earthquakes via a chain of men’s uncontrollable lust and God’s anger over adultery and broke it apart to make the individual pieces easier to examine and ridicule.

Jen never meant or expected the idea to take off, much less “take advantage of society’s sexism.” Once it did, she did an admirable job of steering the inevitable publicity back toward the original intent of mocking the ideas that women are responsible for inciting men’s unholy lust and that such lust leads to earthquakes. She educated at least a few people on the use of statistics to illustrate these claims. She used the opportunity to allow Iranian women’s rights activists–the people actually affected by the cleric’s claims–to be heard in the West.

That some subsequent events were also shaped in part by the pervasive sexism of our society is unsurprising, but is has nothing to do with Jen’s intent, and I shouldn’t have to spell that out in response to a post on that very topic. Nor is it Jen’s responsibility to deal with the predictability of these events. That particular gem of criticism is just a form of the “she should have known” argument. It might be valid if there actually existed a choice between doing nothing, and thus avoiding sexism, and engaging in activism, during which some women are subjected to sexism. That women aren’t offered that particular choice is, again, not something I should have to point out when the occasion is a post about pervasive sexism. Does anyone, for example, really still think Jen would be exempt from unwanted comments and jokes on her appearance if she hadn’t thought up Boobquake?

Right.

Now for the question of whether sexism won. Yes, it won. Sexism always wins. It has the advantage of numbers and entrenched power.

However, sexism also lost, and it keeps on losing.

The Iranian cleric in question changed his stance in response to Boobquake. It isn’t much better than it was before, but he changed it in response to questions from those within his country and his religion. His authority was undermined enough that he had to react.

A large number of the women who participated explicitly rejected the conflations of sex and sin, sex and shame, their clothing and “uncontrollable” male lust. It may not stick, but they’ve done it at least once. That makes them less vulnerable to the coercive messages that surround sex in our society. If Boobquake was a failure in this respect, then so are the Slutwalks that have been spreading across the globe in recent months.

Jen’s profile was raised significantly by Boobquake. That did two important things. First, it added one more good, flexible female speaker to the list of people event organizers draw from. The groups who invite her to speak about Boobquake aren’t turning her down when she wants to talk about something else. Instead, they’re hearing a different talk, frequently the one on “God’s Lady Problem.” Not exactly a win for sexism.

Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, Jen has been identified as a resource for other women in both the skeptic and atheist movements who experience sexism. She’s used her blog to promote the complaints of others. She’s modeled behavior for objecting to sexist treatment in a very public way. She’s used her tenacity to keep the pressure on until she gets an official response on the topic. She’s rallied other prominent atheists and skeptics to amplify her message. She has added substantially to the number of effective voices on the topic. She’s done it with the platform that was built, in part, with Boobquake. And now, she’s seing results.

Sexism found a way to pull a small victory out of Boobquake. The house took its cut. But it only wins if people insist that we’ve lost if we don’t get everything we want right now.

Sexism Always Wins, but It Still Loses

Not in My Constitution

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

A constitution or other governmental charter is a document that exists to specify the operation of a government–and to ensure the rights of the people governed. The largest debate over the U.S. Bill of Rights was over whether the amendments were needed to protect what should be “natural rights” and whether there was any possibility that the enumeration of rights might be considered to limit citizens’ rights to those explicitly granted.

We, the people of the state of Minnesota, grateful to God for our civil and religious liberty, and desiring to perpetuate its blessings and secure the same to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution

Yesterday, the Minnesota House voted to put a question on the November 2012 ballot. In a state in which marriage of same-sex couples is already disallowed by law, in a state where judges have already agreed ruled on the issue, voters will be asked whether our constitution should be amended to limit legal recognition of marriage to unions between one man and one woman.

There wasn’t a great demand for this legislation. Polls in recent years have shown an upswing in support for gay marriage, and an overall lack of support for this kind of amendment. The only poll showing support for an amendment vote is an anti-gay-marriage group that won’t release details on the polling.

The House members who voted for an amendment referendum didn’t speak in favor of the amendment. The one who spoke in favor of the referendum said only that he wanted voters to be able to decide the issue.

ARTICLE I BILL OF RIGHTS

Section 1. OBJECT OF GOVERNMENT. Government is instituted for the security, benefit and protection of the people, in whom all political power is inherent, together with the right to alter, modify or reform government whenever required by the public good.

Sec. 2. RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. No member of this state shall be disfranchised or deprived of any of the rights or privileges secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the law of the land or the judgment of his peers. There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the state otherwise than as punishment for a crime of which the party has been convicted.

Supporters of the amendment suggest they’re trying to “protect” the traditional definition of marriage, something that won’t be replaced or altered by extending the right to marry to gay and lesbian couples. They have identified no public good that will be served by the codification of discrimination. They offer reasons to prohibit gays from marrying that are based solely in religious traditions, personal discomfort, and lies about homosexuals. They claim that equality is an equal right to do something that only person wants to do.

No one has offered a reason for this proposed amendment that could outweigh the continued denial of equal rights to citizens who contribute to make our state what it is. Certainly no one has offered a reason to turn our founding documents, the documents that exist to protect our rights, into a barrier to the rights of all our citizens. We cannot let this abuse of our public documents stand.

Not in My Constitution

The Accommodationism Debate Explained

Desiree Schell, of Skeptically Speaking and other general awesomeness, will be on Atheists Talk in a few weeks to talk about strategies for effecting change. Since the announcement about her appearance happened in the middle of yet another discussion about accommodationism, Desiree (being the smart and highly prepared woman she is) asked for a clear description of a topic that doesn’t come up in what she does as a skeptic or union organizer. I think the results are worth sharing here.

I mainly stick to scientific skepticism, and I don’t follow atheist controversies very closely, so can someone tell me exactly what an accommodationist is? Every time I ask that question I get a different answer. And that’s understandable; I claim terms all the time to structure my own thoughts. But can someone (or a few of you) on this thread tell me about your perception of what that word means? It would help me, because it’s pretty obvious that it’s going to come up on air.

Accommodationism is used to refer to the idea that in order to get the support of religious people on political issues (teaching of evolution, separation of church and state, etc.) one should be careful to not challenge their religious beliefs or should, perhaps, even reinforce them. It’s as big a debate as it is because the idea is both very pragmatic and very problematic.

I think the pro-accommodationism argument is pretty clear and simple. The anti-accommodationism argument is a little more complicated:

  1. Try as you might to not disturb religious beliefs, the truth and supremacy of someone’s religion is exactly what these arguments often boil down to. At some point, you’re stepping on someone’s religious toes. The actual question is whose.
  2. Stepping on the toes of one religion generally looks, to the apathetic masses, like stepping on all religion, no matter what you try to do. Playing a middle game is tricky on the mass level.
  3. While accommodationism might work on a single political issue (although we don’t have evidence that it has), there are going to continue to be fights, all coming out of this same well of religious privilege. Reinforcing the privilege to win one fight is going to make the next fight harder.
  4. Therefore, the way to go is to take on the larger issue of religious privilege, even if it causes problems in the short-term. At that point, this becomes a fight about equality and civil rights, and the whole plan changes a bit.

So, would working with a number of different stakeholders (one of them being a church group) on a single-issue campaign like lobbing the government to keep fluoridating the city’s water system, be considered accommodation? Or is it only accommodation when working on a campaign that involves religion?

There will be a few people who say both. They’ll get lots of attention, but they’re not the sort of people who actually leave the computer and get anything done. For the most part, only the second would be.

So what if an atheist doesn’t much care about the larger idea of religious privilege, and is only personally interested in a single issue like ensuring that evolution is taught in schools. Are they an accommodationist by default?

Probably not by default, but for a single issue, an accommodationist approach really does make a lot of sense if you can find a big enough religious population to whom the issue isn’t intrinsically threatening.

I think that’s why this is so intractable. It’s really a difference of values, and you know how those go.

Do I ever.

The Accommodationism Debate Explained

Big News Is Too Big

The first time I stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon, my response was, “Yep. That’s big.” Then I promptly slipped on some ice and wrenched my knee. I spent the rest of that brief visit sitting down, slowly doling out peanuts to the ravens. I remember the ravens in a fair amount of detail and have been fascinated with corvidae ever since. The Grand Canyon is still just big.

It isn’t just an animal versus rock thing, either. The Little Colorado River flows through a vertical chasm nearby that gripped me as well. I was impressed by how deep and straight the water has cut through the rock and the narrowness of the channel. It was small, by comparison, but the details captured my imagination.

The Grand Canyon, on the other hand, is simply immense in a way that dwarfs its details. Maybe if I’d had more time and mobility, I could have gotten to know a small piece of it. Maybe then the pressure to have an opinion about the place–and that pressure does exist–could be met with more than a shrug. For now, it simply remains big.

On the morning September 11, 2001, the news changed between the time I got out of the car at work and the time I got to my desk. I listened to the radio long enough to understand that, once again, this was something that was simply big. I could, perhaps, if I listened longer, focus on one small aspect of the whole until it made sense, but the whole was always going to be too large. The details were never going add up to something I would truly understand.

There was a conference room with cable news reception. I didn’t go in. The pictures weren’t going to help, and watching the anchors and guests try to make sense of something that big was only going to make me hate their superficiality.

People drifted out of the room all morning. I don’t know whether they gave up on making it all make sense, or whether they each found their own little details from which to mine meaning. At lunchtime, there were two people left, two I respected for their thoughtfulness. I gently chased them out of there with the suggestion that that much immersion might not be good for them. I suspect they were still trying to find the piece that would make it all make sense.

We haven’t found it yet, nearly ten years later. Those of us who lived through it almost certainly never will. Historians who look back from a distance probably won’t either. Like us, they’ll focus on one detail or another, just as we’ve done with all of these events that are just too big.

In the meantime, however, we have a new event to deal with. In itself, it isn’t very large. A dying man is dead, at the hand of one of the nations he harmed. His influence will not have died with him. But he, himself, is dead, and his death is part of an event that is simply too big for us to handle.

There is, once again, immense pressure to decide how we feel about bin Laden’s death, despite the overwhelming size of the events he set in motion. How we react, each of us, will depend on the details we took away with us in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. It was a crime, a tragedy, a political lever, a moment of deep political insecurity, a blow to our national pride, and much more. Our personal reactions now are informed by at least one of those, but I doubt that any of us can be informed by all of them at once.

As it was on September 11, it is time to give ourselves and each other a little break. We’re all behaving appropriately to our understanding of that immense event and those that followed. We’re all behaving inappropriately to someone else’s.

We can’t ever understand the whole of what has happened to us, but maybe, just for a day or two, we can understand that much and let each other be with our personal, emotional, insufficient reactions. Even those of us who have nothing more intelligent to say than, “This is big.”

Big News Is Too Big

True Equivalence

J. J. Ramsey, in a comment on a recent post, suggests that accommodationists aren’t being extra harsh and burdensome to confrontational atheists because the accommodationists treat fundamentalists poorly too. Specifically, he responds to a comment by Jason:

I suspect what Stephanie actually meant was that accomodationists don’t take the same pains in treating “New Atheists” with the same kid gloves they treat religious folks.

With:

But “accommodationists” don’t even uniformly treat the religious with “kid gloves,” as you put it. Toward the creationists, fundamentalists, and other denialists, they are quite willing to be aggressive. The NCSE has, for example, even mocked Expelled.

I’d really just like to put my head down now and say, “We’ve had that discussion. Get over it.” But hey, we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do. Once more, with feeling.

This is what we call “false equivalence.” The fact that two positions within an argument are the most polarized you, personally, have seen doesn’t make them the same thing. Nor does it make the point somewhere between them a moderate position. This is particularly true when one “side” is distinctly in the minority, with the majority in control of most of the channels available for distributing messages. Even more true when the minority is heavily stigmatized.

That false equivalence is the only reason to compare “New Atheist” communications to fundamentalist positions. Confronting religion head on is no more “mean,” “distorting,” or “prejudicial” toward the religious than mainstream religious messaging is toward atheists. Need examples?

New Atheist: Religion is a delusion.
Mainstream: None so blind as those who will not see.
Fundamentalist: Satan resides in your heart.

New Atheist: Religious experiences and belief are the products of cognitive processes. They do not constitute evidence of god(s). Denying that denies science.
Mainstream: I believe in God because I have had these religious experiences. Denying that denies me.
Fundamentalist: Doubt is a personal failure to be fought against.

New Atheist: Religion requires assumption of facts not in evidence and/or contradicting our knowledge of reality.
Mainstream: Atheism requires assuming that what is tangible is the sum of what there is.
Fundamentalist: Denying your god is evil.

New Atheist: Raising a child to believe in sin and hell is a form of child abuse.
Mainstream: It would be cruel to deny your child the experience of God’s love.
Fundamentalist: You risk damning your children to eternal torment by allowing non-religious influences into their lives.

New Atheist: Religion provides a source of authority that is used to hurt others. It is also used to define an outgroup, who are “fair game” for persecution.
Mainstream: Religion provides the source of morality that keeps others from harm. It also provides a sense of brotherhood.
Fundamentalist: Our authority is God’s authority. Those who would threaten that authority must be dealt with or excluded in God’s name.

New Atheist: We must not allow any religion to use the political sphere to promote itself.
Mainstream: We must not allow other religions or atheists to use the political sphere to promote themselves.
Fundamentalist: We must root out all other influences in the political sphere.

And the one most important to the accommodationist promotion of science.

New Atheist: Science undermines the idea of religious myths as a rational interpretation of the world.
Mainstream: We recognize that science reveals the metaphorical nature of our texts but hold that faith is paramount.
Fundamentalist: Science is wrong because our texts tell us so.

People who buy into and pass on this notion that somehow “New Atheism” is equivalent to fundamentalism are perpetuating a narrative that privileges liberal religious thought as the non-extreme, non-confrontational position. They’re placing a burden on atheists to be more conciliatory toward religion than mainstream religion is toward atheism, simply by not recognizing that this is where the equivalence lies.

“New Atheists” are no more judgmental, dismissive, or offensive than the adherents of mainstream religions. They’re certainly not louder on a collective basis, and I doubt that they are on an individual basis either. The only reason that isn’t obvious is that the mainstream anti-atheism narrative is a constant background to life in our society. But really, it doesn’t take much work to stop and look at the evidence. It takes even less to find the true equivalence.

True Equivalence

Taking It Downhill

As biodork (love that handle) pointed out in the comments on my last post, the complaints about “New Atheists” being too…too are hardly any newer than the behavior of confrontational atheists.

In 1969 it was the flamboyant cross-dressers and the in-your-face gays and lesbians who changed the GBLT civil rights movement forever. 40 years later (omg – 40 years???), we’re seeing opinion letters from straight-laced gays and lesbians (pun not intended when it flew from my fingers, but now I’m totally keeping it) who complain about these same people being over the top in the Pride parades with their short leather shorts, glittery, colorful costumes and their loud, effervescent personas.

In her talk at the U of MN Greta Christina touched on the mainstreaming of an identity like being gay or being an atheist. At first the leaders are courageous, spectacular, FABULOUS!, and willing to take fire from the haters. As time goes on more and more “regular joes” who just want to live their lives without making their identity the center of everything will rise up.

When this happens, I think there is a feedback loop that starts to encourage the quieting of these original noisy upstarts by the community that they originally fostered. “Shhh…we don’t need that anymore. They noticed, now be quiet.”

There are many more parallels than this, of course. There are those “radical” feminists who keep insisting on raising a stink because there are plenty of things still broken. They make it so tough for women who have to keep defending themselves from the title in order to go make their comfortable lives a little bit more comfortable. There are those socialists who persist in demanding that poor people be treated like people. It’s so annoying that they won’t just disappear for a bit so the label won’t be applied to those people who want a better tax break on their kids’ educational expenses.

All these pesky crusaders, who just won’t shut up, who won’t just go with the flow for a bit so things can get done, so the people with the keys to the kingdom will give us just a little bit more. Ugh! What is to be done with people so rude, so demanding, so mean?!?

This really shouldn’t be any news to anybody, but those people at the top? The ones who are telling you it would all be okay if you could just get the noisy people to be quiet? They’re not on your side. That stuff they’re telling you? It’s today’s excuse. If you make it go away, tomorrow’s excuse will just be different.

A gatekeeper’s job is to keep people out, not to let them in.

No matter how much you suck up to the people with power (money, position, conformity to the rules), no matter how much you shape yourself to look like them, no matter how much you do the gatekeepers’ jobs for them, you’re never going to receive more than a token award. People in charge didn’t get there by deferring to others. Power is shared grudgingly, if at all.

Those noisy, persistent, aggravating people? What they actually are is threatening. They are the people who have what it takes to grab and hold onto a piece of that power. They’re the ones who aren’t going to wait for it to be shared, not by you and not by the people above you. They don’t have a lot of respect for gates, and less for gatekeepers.

Do they have a chance? That’s hard to say for any given movement at any given moment, but the last couple of centuries suggest that they win in the long run. When they do have setbacks, they aren’t dealt out by the people at the top, either. They come from that complacent, uncomfortable middle. They come from the people who think that getting a couple of inches closer to the gate constitutes a gain worth stepping on others to protect. But in the long run, they’re winning.

So when you find yourself on edge around these people, when you find yourself thinking they’re making your life harder, stop. Think.

Remember that you have a choice. You can stay a part of the gatekeepers’ army, turning around and stomping on those below you. Or you can look at the gatekeepers, step to one side, and say, “These people coming up the hill behind me? I’m with them.”

Taking It Downhill