Guest Essay. Empty Victories and Wishful Thinking. Denton Record Chronicle, 7-1-20

The trend today is to silence the opposing view point. If you have an opinion on Gay rights and their use of pronouns, on the #Me too movement, on Black Lives Matter, or whether or not it is helpful and righteous to remove confederate monuments and rename everything and anything having to do with the South during the Civil War, regardless of whether it’s historic or not, you might as well keep quiet, thus doing yourself a favor. People are being targeted, slandered, bullied, intimidated, browbeaten, fired from jobs, forced to resign, etc., and all because their opinion today, or what their opinion was thirty years ago, happens to go against today’s newest craze, rage, or perhaps even obsessions.

Long ago I once read that when confronted with a personal dilemma, such as whether to lie or tell the truth, or whether to do the right thing vs. the most expedient one, the correct answer, when there was a choice, was always to do the hardest one. Good things come at a price and nothing is for free, the reason that “to live and let live” is harder than turning a blind eye and crushing those who might think different.

How silencing people is going to accomplish anything good escapes me. Although, I do think it will accomplish plenty, but not what people behind those movements are hoping for. Letting people air things out is always better than leaving them fuming in silence. Instead of good will, this will only harden individual opinions: in lieu of inclusion, it will increase resentment, bias and personal prejudice, in place of tolerance and acceptance, it will increase intolerance, fanaticism and narrow-mindedness, thereby shortening the fuse of the very people we are trying to convince to calm down, take a deep breath, listen, rethink and step back.

Link to the Denton Record Chronicle and my article titled: Empty victories and wishful thinking.