“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know
we cannot live within.” — James Baldwin

Actress/filmmaker, Justine Bateman said that with Donald Trump winning the 2024 presidential election, she feels the air has gone out of the “woke party” balloon, and she hopes that now we can all feel like Americans and not fans of rival football teams.

I’ve also seen a lot of the “be an adult” and “we can still be friends” posts on social media.

Well, first, I frown upon terms like “politically correct” and “woke” because the former is disingenuous, and the latter has been co-opted in bad faith. They’ve become fear-mongering buzz words associated with a threat to free speech and to freedom itself. Most of us simply want to be good people and model what we think is good behavior. We want to do what feels right. Speaking for myself, I’m not pretending; it’s genuine, and I don’t care how it appears to anyone because that is how I feel. My only concern is that people don’t harass, discriminate, bully, assault, and kill other humans because they’re different. Further, we shouldn’t be adding fuel to the fire that normalizes dehumanizing and targeting them. Why is that so hard? Why does that spoil all the “fun” for some people?

In truth, my life would be so much easier if I was okay with all the biases and bigotry I witness because my stances have never made me popular, welcome, or accepted by society as a whole.

Ms. Bateman referred to wokeness as emotional terrorism—having to walk on eggshells, getting shut down while wanting to discuss things , questions and opinions being limited to permitted positions only. She stated that, “Everybody has the right to freely live their lives the way they want, so long as they don’t infringe upon somebody else’s ability to live their life as freely as they want.” And now that she believes the woke era is over, she can breathe again.

She is right that we need discourse. Questioning is necessary to understanding. Peeling away the layers of bad faith that permeate any argument is good. And she’s certainly right about people’s right to live the way they want, etc., but she needs to apply this logic across the board. She is describing the emotional terrorism experienced persistently by marginalized groups.

When will people stop infringing on their ability to live their lives freely? When will they breathe again?

Further, many who support freedom of speech can’t seem to apply it to books and accurate history. They have no qualms about denying women and others the freedom they demand for themselves.

And let’s be real. Most of the people who have made public statements that were racist, misogynist, homophobic, etc. have not ruined their careers or even lost their jobs. The majority of them haven’t been doxed or the target of smear campaigns. At the same time, most of us who disagree with people like them have not caused anyone suffering of any kind. Seeing people get hurt is nothing I could ever enjoy, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

That’s right. Most of us don’t care if Nicole Scherzinger likes a red hat that says Make Jesus First Again or any other kind of hat for that matter.

And that’s the thing. As far as understanding where people stand, online interactions are often deceiving. Social media is infested with bad faith actors who are not open to you disproving anything they say with reason. They present you with straw man arguments. Their strategy is to misrepresent your position to the point of it being preposterous. They resort to name calling. It’s futile to engage in any of that.

Next, I do have conservative friends. We have listened to one another’s ideas and discussed them. Most of them were not Trump supporters, but there are Trump supporters who have been very kind to me, some of whom I love dearly—still. I just can’t watch people celebrate while ignoring what we’re told will be a horrible fate for many. It’s especially difficult to see people mocking the most vulnerable people whose rights and lives are in jeopardy, reveling in their misery, and acting as though this victory is a loving act of God.

Those of us who oppose Trump are not about to suddenly be okay with others supporting a racist and alleged rapist and I, like many others, am appalled by the ideology that led us here—racism, misogyny, ableism, disregard for the poor and the elderly, and all the phobias to boot.

What I hate about political platforms is the idea that whether you are democrat or republican, you support everything on that platform. As a registered democrat, I am fully aware of how my party has let us down over the years. They had ample time to resolve certain issues that remain unresolved, and that’s not something I easily dismiss. However, none of that will have me voting to deny other human beings their rights or for an authoritarian/totalitarian government of oligarchs.

It’s just sad that we can’t have a good balance of anything in our government.

Anyway, a few days after the election, I started reading a book that validated what I’ve been feeling for a long time. The book is called, Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light by Robert Burney. (Yes, as a person in recovery, I do read a lot about codependency. It has helped me more than I ever imagined it would.)

We talk about dysfunctional families a lot, right? Well, author Robert Burney maintains that humanity itself is a dysfunctional family because of the way we are taught to see things, the way we’re taught to act and be, the examples we get from role models, etc. As far as he’s concerned, we’re constantly dealing with wounded souls, broken hearts, and scrambled minds. It’s up to each of us to fix ourselves, and many never will.

That in mind, let’s go back to the two political parties discussing sensitive topics with sometimes loaded arguments. It seems to me that a huge part of the dysfunction leads to personal bias constantly getting in the way of any meaningful discourse. It is bias in many forms—hasty generalizations, otherizing, bandwagon fallacies, empirical fallacies and so on. In many cases, assigning God as the authority is the final say, allowing people to claim the moral high ground. Argument over. At the same time, there seems to be quite a lot of confusion about what God says.

There’s also the catastrophizing.

Like the idea that cisgender men will dress up as trans women to sneak into public bathrooms and rape women when rapists have found a million other ways to do it in much more effortless and less risky situations.

If I’m not mistaken, it was Donald Trump who said, “Kids will go to school and come back transgender.” If he ever spoke to trans people, he would know how difficult that path is—what they go through just to live and survive in this world and what they’d have to endure if they hoped to transition. The process, the expense, the pain. People don’t do that stuff willy nilly. They do it because of how painful it is not to do it. Those of us who are born as what we’re comfortable being are lucky we never have to worry about that.

Recently, an online discussion about whether boys should be told not to cry resulted in the spouting of opinions I never would have expected in this decade or even this century.

Arguments made suggested that if you acknowledge it’s okay for men to cry, men will be bawling and blubbering publicly at the slightest inconveniences. One comment was that teaching boys it’s okay to cry is what results in them thinking they can be women. Yet another said, “Anger is an emotion, too. So, if you tell men not to suppress their emotions, be prepared for angry, abusive behavior.”

Well, even those of us who are “allowed” to show our emotions practice restraint when we feel the circumstances require it. They talk about men like they are inhuman beasts who are incapable of restraint.

It’s true. Some people think there’s only one image of a man. It’s the one they want or want their son to be, but they’re not considering that it may not be what he is, and that there are plenty of people who will embrace him as he is. A super sensitive, gentle man can be every bit as appealing as a man who is rough and tough and seemingly invincible. The most exciting man I’ve ever known was quite masculine, but he cried his eyes out when his dog died, feeling no shame or inhibition, and it endeared him to me even more.

There are people who actually say about gay and trans people and seemingly effeminate men, “They don’t go in that direction if you raise your kids right.”

Yet, that direction is who they are. How can you love someone and reject who they really are? That says you love the fantasy you created in your head about them, but you don’t love them.

Then, to call extending rights and acceptance of differences a “slippery slope” and say we’re going to move on to people marrying pigs and goats is disingenuous. You don’t see the majority of us advocating for pedophilia (another thing right-wingers attribute to liberals because of a handful of culprits but not to priests who also have a handful of culprits.) On either side, advocating for something like that is horrific, and to associate something that vile with marginalized groups who are trying to live their lives and not harming anybody is possibly the most egregious example of a slippery slope argument, with massively harmful implications.

Slippery slope is a particularly dangerous logical fallacy and an argument devoid of substance because any argument can be turned into a slippery slope, which does nothing to undermine the original argument. It’s a tactic used when people don’t know how to address the original argument, and it leaves the original argument unresolved as people are now arguing about a different outcome, often one unrelated to the original.

There is no rule that says if we allow X, then we must allow Y, where Y has a number of completely different conditions from X, and only contains X or parts of X as a means to associate it. We can and should evaluate both arguments separately. That’s the solution to any slippery slope argument.

I’m not saying you won’t find biases on both sides. I am saying that misguided belief paradigms are one of humanity’s biggest problems. That’s what we have to fix in order to find our unity.

I saw someone post about the American Dream. “Bring it back!” he proclaimed. And in his mind, that is his cisgender white heterosexual male’s dream of a subservient stay-at-home ultra-feminine wife, their kids, and their white picket fence.

Obviously, that’s not everyone’s dream. You are allowed to have your dream and your preferences, but then let other people have theirs.

Child with heart image by Anna Kolosyuk on social or copy the text below to attribute. Child