LogFAQs > #910395064

Prior to social media exploding, many conservatives were largely sheltered from what people on the Left actually thought -- of them and in general. Many of them lived in small towns or in rural areas where, should they encounter someone too different from them, they mostly had the ability to torment them until they either conformed or moved away. While their media complained about us, while Rush Limbaugh screamed about "feminazis," while they said all manner of racist and homophobic things, it never really touched their lives. They had control and, they felt, they had social power.

Then, quite suddenly, because of social media, millions of people were privy to concepts and conversations that had been going on for years that they had never been exposed to. I think the first time I heard the term "white privilege" was in the '90s, but to many of these people, they believed they were being smacked in the face all of a sudden with new terms and new social norms that they didn't understand. It was a kind of future shock. But worst of all was that these new social norms were being dictated by the very people who were supposed to "just let them."

Let me tell you a story. When I was in sixth grade, this girl who spent an absurd amount of her time trying to bully me pulled me aside in the girl's room and, practically pleading with me, said, "You're pretty. Your parents are rich. We would leave you alone, you could be popular, if you just stopped dressing like that and stopped acting weird." Of course, being as obstinate then as I am now, I continued to do as I pleased because I genuinely did not give a flying fuck what she thought of me. And even then, I understood that this was what she was mad about and that this is what had made me a target. Not that my clothes were "weird" or that I was otherwise "different," but that I didn't care and it seemed stupid to me that anyone would care. This tendency was interpreted by not only my classmates, but by teachers and administrators, as me thinking I was "better" than everyone else, and it positively enraged them.

More importantly, however, is that when I left that school, I left with yearbook pages full of people telling me that me being myself made them feel like it was OK to be themselves. This is what they fear most of all -- the domino effect. The slippery slope. If one person defects and the discovers the world doesn't end, they lose control of everyone. They lose their power. This is why they fight us every step of the way, on everything, no matter how silly a thing it is to fight.