They stood at the corner of a frighteningly busy intersection at rush hour and held various homemade signs with an overriding theme: Perhaps we as a society should see women as human beings worthy of respect and dignity.
I was on my way to get ice cream with my 13-year-old son when we stopped at the intersection and saw the gathering — mostly young women with a smattering of sheepish young guys and a handful of older folks — urging passersby to honk if they agreed that the men who run our institutions should believe women when they say they’ve been sexually assaulted. The gathering seemed to stem from the Cornell 7 case, though it was a variation of a theme that has become almost passe with a federal government run by abusers who treat the American people as their victims.
The gathering brought me back to the Women’s March, before we were numb to a sex criminal occupying the land’s highest office and working tirelessly to promote other sexual attackers to top government positions. I never thought 2017 would be the Good Old Days. So it goes.
I honked my horn a couple times as I rolled past the protesters. There was lots of affirmative honking and thumbs up and cheers from car windows, along with a bearded guy hanging out of his $100,000 protester-killer pickup truck screaming something obscene at a group of young women who gave it right back to him.
My son was embarrassed. He slumped into the passenger seat and said “Dad” exactly the way teenagers say “Dad” when they desperately want dad to stop whatever he’s doing.
“What’s wrong?” I said. “These are good people doing a good thing.”
My son sat up in his seat and considered what I had said. He seemed to nod in begrudging agreement. “You’re just doing too much,” he said. “Just way too much.”
We talked about it while we got ice cream, and what my eighth grade boy seemed to mean was that honking and cheering for folks putting themselves out there with messages of support for survivors of sexual assault was very much Not Cool. Being so earnest was, I suppose, “cringe,” as the kids might say, and as my kid did in fact say later that night. Exposing oneself to potential criticism and mocking, saying what you really mean about an important issue, dropping all pretense of detachment: This was not cool.
And really, it’s never been cool. It wasn’t cool when I was coming of age, although being earnest had a brief moment of cultural cache among millennials in 2008 as we got Barack Obama elected. We cared and we weren’t embarrassed about it. We would’ve done anything to make Republicans go away forever, and for a while, it felt like we had done just that. Our earnestness and total lack of swag had paid off with the destruction of the GOP as a nationally competitive party, until, of course, Republicans chose to do away with the handshake norms of democracy.
Millennials are by far the corniest generation, a mass of folks who grew up in the relative stability of the ‘80s and ‘90s and all its mainline cultural liberalism and believed Better Things Were Possible. So when I see my son back away from earnestness like a vampire with a garlic clove waved in his face, I tell him it’s OK to care about things, especially things that matter, things that affect people who are not going to get help from powerful people and institutions that today have no interest in anything beyond seeking the void that fascist movements always seeks.
If you don’t care, I tell him, who will? You can’t rely on folks willing to get on the corner of a busy intersection and tell drivers that sexual assault is actually bad and should not be accepted by society or its institutions — the universities that do anything and everything to defend and protect the sexual assaulters on their campuses, the government agencies and politicians who sit on their hands when allegations of sexual assault surface, the media outlets that have no interest in the president’s ties to the most infamous sex trafficker in history.
It’s important, I think, for dads and uncles and coaches to tell young guys today that it’s OK to care, and to show you care. Even when guy friends — so racked with insecurity they can barely function — try to police their masculinity and keep them within the narrow bounds of what it is to be a man in the third decade of the 21st Century, it’s important to care. It’s vital to ignore those who cry about virtue signaling and to stand there with vulnerable groups of fellow humans and signal your virtues until you can’t signal anymore.
Older guys — even Gen Xers, if they’re ready and willing — should understand it’s a powerful thing to stand up and tell boys and teens and young men that no one else is going to do the right thing if you don’t do the right thing. If that makes you uncomfortable and vulnerable, good! That’s how you know you’re doing it right. That’s how you know you’re setting a good example for other young guys who might feel for victims of sexual assault but wouldn’t dare speak up for fear of being dismissed as a social justice warrior, someone who cares about something beyond being and looking cool.
I gave this whole shpiel to my kid later that night after we finished up our ice cream. He nodded and seemed to get it, but said girls weren’t into guys who acted out of earnestness and a desire to make society somewhat better. Yeah, I said, that’s probably true, and you can ignore those girls, who will one day realize you were right and they were wrong. They might even wish other young men in their social circles had been cheesy and cringe and said in a clear voice that no, it’s not OK to treat girls poorly and ignore their agency and treat them as something just short of fully human.
More of that sort of guidance from us older guys and I think we can defeat the folks who say protesting fascism is cringe and stupid. It’s these people who create the environment in which fascism can thrive, all because they don’t want to be deemed uncool, for being uncool is a fate worse than death, or, at least, the death of democracy.
Thank you.
The late Walter Koenig (RIP) wrote about the "cult of cool" a bit. Even in 1978 he was writing about how he would rather feel emotions, be excited, angry, and sad than be detached from the world.
I have to put my Game Face on when I go out, but I hate the thing these days where caring about anything is "cringe". I was extremely self-conscious and had anxiety to the point it was crippling, but I got professional help and eventually learned to be myself and like myself.
All they care about is acquisitiveness. Because that's all that matters in late capitalism. Caring about other things is just an obstacle to that sacred precept.