Article by Dan Redington in The American Thinker
The Perils of Politeness in an Era of Activism
Our Canadian brothers and sisters to the north are known universally for maple syrup, hockey, and an unwavering politeness. But what used to be an endearing quality common to the peoples of the great North is now proving to be their cultural undoing. The same can be said for our easygoing Aussie counterparts. Until recently, we were all under the impression that Australians were just a sort of crazier version of Americans. Similar in temperament and values and most notably in their love of freedom. But just look at what has happened to their country in an incredibly short period of time.
The western world is currently engaged in a very real struggle, with the majority of generally good people on one side and a small number of perpetually offended activists and their trained student contingent on the other. We in the majority would like nothing more than to be left alone. We do not wish to harm or offend anyone, but we have arrived at a moment in our cultural evolution where our very existence is the offense. We are not allowed to exist in the world envisioned by these ignorant, moralizing children and at the core of all their scattered and incoherent ideology is the authoritarian fist of a bully.
They have pushed us around for decades and we have meekly submitted to their increasingly bizarre worldview, naively believing that they would someday grow out of their youthful angst. The difference here is that these people have gone beyond the Frankfurt School’s dream of infiltrating the institutions and have now bullied their way into every aspect of our world.
Why has this been allowed to happen, you ask? Because we have been too polite to these maleducated activists, too acquiescent to the demands of these unrestrained adolescents, and if you get right down to the heart of it, in our words and in our deeds, we have been cowards.
Not long ago the consequences of this culturally compliant cowardice came crashing directly into my world. A person in my life, a beautiful, intelligent, sensitive individual, whom I genuinely love, went off to college and, wouldn’t you know it, she had a revelation. Believe it or not, she is trans. Always has been too. Just never acted on it, or mentioned it, or possibly even considered it until she arrived at college. I will concede that it is likely she had been previously indoctrinated to some degree online, but nothing happened until she went off to school. The enabling structures aligned with the university provided her with a regimen of testosterone, a good dose of encouragement, and off she went on her way to becoming the man she currently believes she always was.
As she injects experimental levels of synthetic hormones formulated in a lab into her body everyone around her applauds. No one dares to ask her how she came to this realization. No one points to the well-hidden but growing number of detransitioning individuals who realized too late that they made a horrible life-altering mistake. No one stops to says 'wait, is there maybe something else going on in your life? Is it possible, just possible that this radical step isn’t the magical solution you have been led to believe it is?' Not even professional therapists are allowed to do anything other than affirm a child’s psychological self-diagnosis.
Her own family doesn’t know what to do because these activists have intimidated lawmakers in Canada and, now, increasingly in the U.S. into passing legislation where if she threatens suicide then you had better affirm her self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria, or you could be criminally prosecuted. This is accomplished under the pretense that asking a young person if they're sure they are trans is somehow tantamount to conversion therapy. If you do not support her injecting unstudied levels of hormones into her perfectly functioning body and then further support her as she engages in irreversible surgeries that destroy natural biological function and could easily leave her permanently sterile, then you are a criminal. You are the source of hate. For trying to protect your daughter from a cult that demands she concede her own unique and perfect body is something that she must reject, something that she needs to medically alter -- It’s madness. And this is at the college level. What is happening to minors as young as four years old in our society is truly monstrous.
But again, how did this happen? It boils down to one thing -- We the people, the grownups of the West, have failed to speak the truth. There is such a thing as objective truth in this world, but we have allowed a confluence of post-modernists, aging sixties professors, infiltrating Marxists, and Democrat party activists of every stripe to contemptuously run roughshod over our society implementing their feelings as policy while ignoring truth and pretending reality they disagree with simply does not exist.
I am not advocating for violence or even for a more heated debate. All I am saying is that we must stop being afraid to speak the truth. Words are not violence. That idea is one that people who cannot debate the merits of their own positions use to shut down civil discourse. We cannot destroy free speech in order to accommodate the fragile emotions of a small number of misguided children who do not understand and cannot articulate what they claim to believe.
This cowardice must end. We must speak up today. Try this -- say one true thing. Don’t be cruel, don’t try to pick a fight; just say out loud one true thing. Remember courage is contagious, truth is objective, and reality, in the end, will always win. We are on the side of truth; they are at best woefully misguided. We see value in the physical and cultural structures of our world; they are engaged on multiple fronts in the intentional destruction of western civilization. We are right and they are wrong. Let’s stop being so damn polite about it.
