The world wants you to believe in stark black and white. We’re told we must choose between freedom and safety, right and left, equality and merit, individualism and community. We’re told there’s always a correct answer, that compromise is weakness, and that any nuance means moral failure. But the real world doesn’t live in absolutes—it lives in shades and gradients, in the slow work of discernment.
Fascism doesn’t usually arrive with torches and parades. It creeps in through culture, through habits of thought and language that make authoritarian politics feel normal. We explore Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism alongside today’s U.S. landscape, asking what we’re willing—and unwilling—to get used to.
I’ve noticed a trend that started way back in the “before time” pre-Covid. But it’s become far more prevalent now and businesses haven’t really caught up yet.
How was this possible? The northern states were far more populous- at least in terms of those eligible to vote. But remember at that point, the criteria for eligibility was white, male landowners. But they wanted to have something available in the system to account for total population- women, children, ….and slaves.
I am not offering this list as any definitive “you should absolutely add this to your reading/listening/watching”. But I thought I would share with you all the resources I’ve been working through to gain a better understanding of the past, present, and future of us as a people, as Americans, and specifically of systematic, unwarranted, invisible white privilege.
It’s no wonder so many always wants to go back to “the good ol’ days”, because when we have it great, and we’re the ones riding high on power and wealth, the only things we see through our rose-tinted-backward-facing lenses are the high points. Not the individuals or people groups whose lives were destroyed to get there.
We want to be the good guy. We have this instinctive moral imperative almost built into us that we have to be the good guy. But in order to do this, we’ve taught ourselves that there must be “bad guys” for our “goodness” to overcome.
Society doesn’t improve when the naysayers stand by and proclaim “I told you so.” It improves when, as a community, we decide that we’re better than the sum of our parts.
When I was growing up, I hated hearing “because I said so”. It felt like a cop out answer when an adult didn’t really have any conviction behind what they said but they wanted it to happen anyway. It felt… lazy. And so I distinctly recall making the decision at a very young age to never tell someone “because I said so”.
I shudder to think about how much of our time in life is spent with labels. I think it must be human nature to attempt, in some way, to categorize things in order to make sense of them. But in doing so, we attach such blanket generalities to things that what we end up doing is exactly the opposite. We confuse the issue. We make it all harder to sort out and make sense of, not easier.
