Far from the bullying crowd - Jeffrey Zeldman Presents

Poignant post by Zeldman on the vaguaries of childhood in a “strong man” society. This one hurts to read, because I remember tauntings like this:

If you were smart in eighth grade, you were also a fag. I don’t even think they meant you were actually queer. I think it was just one of the worst things a bully could call you before pounding on you. Indeed, it lent an aura of righteousness and inevitability to the beatings that got doled out to you. Surely all red-blooded American boys would want to beat up fags! And who could blame them? Not the schools. Not the churches. And certainly not the cops. Why, it was practically a young man’s duty to rid the world of insufficiently macho peers. A kind of post-birth eugenics, if you will.

And wrapped up perfectly in the end:

I don’t know why I’m thinking about these things again lately. It’s not like America’s most vulnerable citizens are being targeted by a hostile, mentally retrograde government. Not like bullies, racists, and homophobes everywhere have been set free to revert to their ugliest selves by a mentally deficient ringleader who knows how to whip up a crowd and feed their hunger for violence as a screen behind which he robs us all. Of our money, of course. But more importantly of our rights, our dignity, our ability to accept one another and celebrate our differences instead of masking them. Most of all, the bullying crowd is robbing us of the more perfect union many of us hoped America was beginning to achieve. But, hey. How ’bout that Gulf of America. Winning.

We have descended into our deepest and most troublesome id. And it’s not just the U.S. Lots of countries around the world have shifted to the “right”. Because of reasons. Reasons that I can’t fathom. But plenty of people do. And they are not only accepted, they are celebrated.

Growing up, I just thought the U.S. was better than that. That we were above that.

We are not. And honestly, maybe we never were.