Innocents die while virtue signaling "activists" do what virtue signaling "activists" do
Innocents die while virtue signaling "activists" do what virtue signaling "activists" do
Someone in a NYC apartment building hung a Palestinian flag in their window. They may have been Palestinian but the odds are they were just virtual signaling, e.g. displaying their woke-ness by siding with whom the woke doctrine says to support — remaining diligently intolerant of other opinions.
As you can see in this video right here, other local “protestors” decided to loudly chant “Take it down” until the flag was removed — remaining intolerant of one’s freedom to display such a flag and intolerant of local residents’ right to not be disturbed by such irrational noise.
Meanwhile…
The person hanging the flag did less than nothing to help innocent Gazans being uprooted and bombed. But they probably got a good social media post out of the effort.
The people harassing the flag-displayer into compliance did less than nothing to help innocent Israelis. But they took the flag-based virtue signaling seriously enough to organize their own “protest” that included vulgar insults.
As is the norm for “activists,” nothing of value was accomplished. No one had to even break a sweat to engage in all this ineffective exhibitionism.
The blood still flows in the Middle East. The money still flows to the banks and corporations. The denial still flows, well… almost everywhere.
How many times must a man look up/Before he can see the sky?
And how many ears must one man have/Before he can hear people cry?
How many deaths will it take 'til he knows/That too many people have died?
Who among us has ears to hear and eyes to see?
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Good example.
The performative aspect of nominal activism tends to badly compromise or overwhelm every possible positive aspect. There's also a ton of careerist parasitism, crackpot hijacking/entryism, straight up grifting—both long and short cons, and irresponsibly indulged mental illness. Was it always this way? It afflicts all efforts across the ideological spectrum.
One of my most insightful friends made a good case that part of the solution, perhaps the largest, rests in attending to the pre-political. We need a base of understanding—internalised values—that can successfully fend off the negative manifestations. There's no way to organically rule out human failing, but we could at least have some healthy folkways to deal with it.
I've been a collector of quotations for several decades now. Yesterday I was reminded of this one. “Everyone sees what they want to see in your mom, everyone gets to be offended in their own special way. Your mother’s story allows people of any political stripe to say ‘Shame on you,’ which is just delicious these days. It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.” – character in the amazing novel 'The Nix' (2016), by Nathan Hill (reviewed here https://www.npr.org/2016/08/31/490101821/the-nix-is-a-vicious-sprawling-satire-with-a-very-human-heart )