I know, or I think I know, something of how members of embattled minority populations feel, and perhaps even more clearly how members of pseudo-embattled minorities and pluralities feel about their status in society. (One should remember that many people who hold a view of themselves as embattled minorities in the United States are middle class white Protestants. Deride their sense of themselves if you will, but the sense is there.)
What I find is that the people who control the nation and the neighborhood
are oblivious to my truth, they disagree with my clearest insights,
or worst of all simply disregard my entire worldview.
(I naturally define myself and my world propositionally,
which is yet another way in which my thoughts shed light on life
while most other people are muddling around in the dark. Trust me.)
What are some examples of obvious truths which are disregarded?
• Walking and biking should be privileged over automotive traffic.
• Monocultures of alien grass are ugly and environmentally costly.
• Burning electric lights outside all day does nothing for the homeowner
but increase the electric bill, while shining them all night does that
plus ease the work of any thief who might be around.
• Posting young males in crowded buildings (like major airports)
with loaded, operational, automatic firearms is dangerous to everybody.
• Schools serve society best when students are connected to the community.
Merely being disregarded is frustrating and isolating. That's bad enough
and it is a major component of the sense of being an embattled minority.
Added to that is the sense that those with power are threatening
my preferred way of life.
• Arrogant drivers threaten my safety and my health
and force excessive alertness on those using responsible transportation.
• Kentucky grass species constantly invade all other types of landscaping.
• Soot, sulphur, and greenhouse gas threaten my health and economic security.
• I fear travel by air because of the measures taken in the name of safety.
Never mind that I never had much love for air travel,
except in comparison to long distance driving.
• Young people (on whose competence I will depend for the rest of my life)
are not being shaped by these very insights that their parents already ignore!
And when each of my dire predictions comes true, I am confident that the benighted majority will demand increases in all of their mistakes, claiming that to be the "common sense" way of dealing with the effects: More illumination for potential thieves, more guns in public places, more isolation for students -- indeed, this is happening now.
Well.
All that is somewhat supercilious and petulant from an old guy who is probably financially secure for life and who over the past decades has shown himself to be adept at manipulating social institutions such as the legal and health systems to his personal advantage. True enough. But what I claimed was that is I understand something about how other people sense their world. I never claimed that my feeling of being put upon by a faceless majority -- or any similar feeling by anyone else -- was factually justified. In the case of white middle class evangelical Protestant suburbanites these feelings are clearly no more justified than they are for me. And no less real.
They feel embattled; I feel embattled. I know how they feel. But in actual reality does that help? One would suppose that I would gain empathy for my neighbors, or they for me, but this doesn't necessarily follow. I know they may claim to feel embattled and powerless, but I truly am ... not ... powerless. I mean that my sense of being embattled and threatened defines a category for the "others" as powerful and oppressive; any claims by the "others" that they are threatened are dismissed as mendacious in view of the power they are wielding over my life, my hopes, and my plans. Even though their claims sound the same as mine, I class their reality as being different and so dismiss any possibility of empathy. And they do the same. The reality that we think we know at first hand outweighs the contradictory experiences which someone else may claim to have.
In playing the actual reality game, false beliefs about being oppressed are only helpful if they can be mined for insight about the motivations of other players.