I’m a largely tolerant person. Not for myself, mind you. I’m ruthlessly harsh on myself. However, everyone else is entitled to their own beliefs, no matter how stupid they are. The beauty of freedom is that everyone can openly believe the dumbest stuff in existence without risking life and limb for it (though they still risk public shame).
With that said, my Shnoogy Wiggles and I have learned to develop a strong distaste for a few words in our household:
1. Empowerment
Empowerment means “authority or power given to someone to do something”, but what does it really mean?
For one, it seems to imply the word “women’s” in front of it rather often. So what, pray-tell, can a woman receive authority or power to do in a country where women have as many rights as men?
The answer is simple: women in this country are often regarded as more powerful than men. I’ve heard a theory kicked around that it’s to fully equalize (see: compensate for) the inherent biological advantages of manhood, but that’s only on the premise that men and women are biologically inherently different, and only uneducated people would believe that.
2. Awareness
There’s quite a bit of money in awareness movements these days. I may create an Awareness Campaign Awareness movement just to cash in. All I need is to sell an overpriced brightly-colored rubber wristband, call a low-holiday month “Thing Awareness Month”, a website that uses enough jargon to obscure actionables to the average person beyond donating, and a thing nobody could ever disagree with kinda sucks to have.
Why do we need awareness of things? I’m fairly certain most seven-year-olds were already aware of breast cancer, autism, abuse, and welding workman’s comp underpayments.
The answer, again, is painfully simple. Awareness addresses the problem without providing legitimate solutions. For example, I’m a strong supporter of autism awareness, but I believe someone with mid- to high-functioning autism has answers beyond a government check and public defamation.
Sadly, many folks buy into this flavor of slacktivism, and shame on you for not supporting their support of [unfair thing].
3. Victim
A victim is “a person harmed, injured or killed because of a crime, accident or other event or action.”
Technically, by that definition, everyone is somehow a victim. I’m a victim of McDonald’s, for example, because an employee took too much time on my order and made me late to where it harmed my reputation for timeliness. My Goober Noodles is a victim of a small child who continually steps on her bare feet with his poor foot-eye coordination, damages property from poor hand-eye coordination, and makes our eardrums bleed from poor ear-mouth coordination.
Being unfairly harmed by others is obviously an unfortunate place to be, and declaring yourself a victim is a healthy start on the path of self-awareness. However, professing victimhood is the start, and not the end, of your journey, since it will never make you happy.
If you are hurt by another person’s unjust behavior, you are absolutely correct in identifying it, but if you want to move into something meaningful you have to look inside yourself and to Christ, not to anyone else, to find meaning from it.
However, imposing victimhood on others has been the vogue recently, and that’s for one clear reason:
1. Leftism
Conservatives hold to varying degrees of equality, but believe an inherent uniqueness between people and status. Complementarians, for example, believe men and women are different and those differences contribute in their own ways to complete each other.
Conservative values also believe in the general “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mantra, which is why old folks seem to lean further conservative and why conservative is usually considered the opposite of “progressive”.
Liberalism believes in equality. A man and a woman may have differences, but society should view what they do as equal irrespective of who they are. Oppressed minorities need advocates, unequal pay should be rectified, homosexuals should legally be allowed to marry as much as heterosexuals, and so on.
In many ways, solid Christians believe many conservative and a number of liberal ideas. We all have different stations in life, but God made us all equal in His image. We may reap our actions, but nobody is responsible for what they were born into.
Leftism now travels farther beyond the pale than conventional liberalism. It has moved down the spectrum into audacious defiance of any common sense.
Leftism believes society should only identify people by their demographic background and never on their individuality. Leftism treats a Muslim Arab woman who murders three white men with her car as profoundly different than a white man who murders three Muslim Arab women with his car.
Left thinking believes every ailment of society comes from the majority oppressing the minority, and heterosexual white males (especially the wealthy ones) are the largest cause for any injustice. Donald Trump, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg are the exact same level of criminal, the United States was formed to oppress blacks and women, and so on.
Now that leftism has a world stage, it can politicize everything. I’m currently writing about a personal philosophical view on a hinky little blog, but if I got enough views I’d make myself onto the left’s unofficial blacklist and reap the wrath of the leftist media.
To be clear, leftism is distinctively anti-God. It hates every boundary God created. It employs Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals to feed into dissatisfaction and unhappiness toward a financially profitable political end. They have a relatively predictable formula, but that’s another story for another day.
A Stucky Life 