Fuck your Namaste, motherfucker
There is a toxic and disingenuous notion among particularly vocal people on the right that if someone publicly professes an interest in social justice, ending grotesque social and economic iniquities and protecting the environment, then unless they move into a shack in the woods and give all their money to Greenpeace they are terrible hypocrites who should feel ashamed of themselves for betraying their hippie dippy principals.
And if people on the left should ever do the unthinkable and betray the American constitution and first amendment by, um, protesting in the streets against policies they find morally abhorrent and deeply unAmerican then the right has very specific and concrete ideas about what is and is not acceptable in a protestor.
The Conservative ideal of a leftist protester is Martin Luther King. In the minds of conservatives, Martin Luther King was not a battle-scarred, Socialist-leaning warrior for truth and justice but rather a respectable black man in a suit and tie who held rallies where he politely asked the white establishment for civil rights so often that they finally remitted and said, “Sure! Have all the rights you want! And thanks for waiting so patiently! Because you’re not one of those bad negroes like Malcolm X, we’re giving you a double portion of Civil Rights! Aren’t white people just the best? This was such an easy and smooth process!”
And then Martin Luther King and black people lived happily ever after, right? The right’s bizarre perversion of King and his legacy reached its tragicomic nadir when Rob Schneider, whose racial legacy bolls down to a distressing eagerness to play offensive Asian stereotypes in multiple movies and TV shows, tweeted Civil Rights legend John Lewis (who did things like get his head busted marching alongside Martin Luther King), “Rep. Lewis. You are a great person. But Dr. King didn’t give into his anger or his hurt. That is how he accomplished and won Civil Rights.”
It’s hard to know where to begin with an epic piece of myopic self-delusion like that, but I find it fascinating that the guy who became famous for humping a goat in The Animal refers to Civil Rights as something that have been accomplished and won, seemingly conclusively and permanently, a half fucking century ago, no less, and not a war that is being fought in the streets every day.
The only protest the right will ever accept from the left is one that is small and civil and well-behaved enough for it to be ignored and dismissed as the pointless whining of an insignificant and powerless group of people. If you’re black and you’re protesting institutional and systematic racism then no matter how nicely you dress up, in the enemy’s eyes you’re a violent thug regardless of your actions, rhetoric or beliefs. If you’re a passionate progressive, then in their eyes you must be a paid agitator financed by George Soros because an astonishingly large number of people inexplicably seem to think no one can hate President Trump with a terrifying fury unless being paid handsomely to do so.
To this I say, fuck your “Namaste”, motherfucker. We don’t have to dress up in our Sunday best or embody Zen Buddhism and Christ-like selflessness in order to live our values or fight for what we believe in. We don't have to be Wavy Gravy to resist.
The left is not fighting for Arrested Development to be renewed for perpetuity or for Starbuck’s to feature the Unicorn Frappuccino year round. It’s fighting for real issues. It’s fighting for our country to remain our country, a bastion of freedom and a haven for the oppressed and the persecuted, and not a country that oppresses and persecutes both its own people and people cursed enough to want to become Americans in the age of President Trump. We’re fighting for our country to stop its terrifying lurch towards Fascism and its warmongering ways. We’re fighting for immigrants, for trans rights, for women, for reproductive rights and gun control and a hundred other life-or-death issues where the stakes almost couldn’t get higher.
I’m not calling for violence, of course, but when you’re fighting to hold onto your country, for your children’s sake as well as your own, an excess of politeness becomes a terrible detriment. It’s okay to be powered by anger and hurt. What’s happening to our country hurts a lot of people’s souls. It’s okay to feel that pain, but it’s essential to put it to productive ends. As long as your anger is a righteous anger, there’s no reason to let go of it. We’re all angry now, and by “we” I mean people who are not terrible, but it’s important to let that anger guide us, and not poison us.
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