Over the past few months – years, really, but it’s accelerating – I’ve found myself espousing opinions that not only piss off the expected cohort of fragile conservatives, but would also piss off the majority of my corporate-captured leftist friends. So I tiptoe around, lest I tip off this far-left end of the horseshoe on which I am encamped, and I look over at the other encampment across what feels like an uncrossable gulf of experience.
Am I newly tolerant of fascists? Not at all, but on this bank the term is overused. Am I still a queer ally? Yes, but I find myself thinking about and operating on a completely different paradigm which would be difficult to explain without pissing off a bunch of people prone to knee-jerk reactions to everything. Do I suddenly love capitalism? No, but I can also more clearly see how it has infected the leftist idea enclaves which I used to frequent.
So where do I go from here? Bearing in mind that the map is not the territory, and in any case, there’s no map to read from.
I want people to start to unpack their identity baskets on this. I give an opinion – let’s start with an easy one, which is that I strongly feel that people should have the medical freedom to refuse an unwanted intervention such as a vaccine – and I’m immediately kidnapped and forcibly bundled into an identity basket with a variety of other opinions, only some of which I agree with. Like a shopping basket algorithm of ideas. You’re antivax (I’m not, actually), so I bet you’re a foolish, anti-Science™, MLM-peddling Trumpist. You fascist! (At which point I just shake my head confusedly and leave.)
Unfortunately for a certain breed of anarchist, the anti-corporate decentralising banner is currently being held by erstwhile ideological enemies on the right side of the horseshoe, and if we want that idea back, we have to nick it out of what has become a rather unpleasant identity basket. Like treasure at a seedy thrift shop. Treasure at a Salvation Army charity shop. You can get it back, but at the cost of engaging with ideas and people you previously shunned.
And then in the process you think, Hey, it’s not all bad in here. So you pay for your treasure and shut your mouth – newly ideologically tainted.
And that’s where I’m at. Make of it what you will. It’s precarious this far down the horseshoe.
Sonya Blanck writings 