Fighting The Marginalizers And Reconstituting The Klan

Wife kitteh volunteers with a local Jesuit organization to help poor children get an education. The whole affair is lovely and successful with lots of kids going on to be the first in their families to graduate from college. The work they do is God's work and the people they help are God's children. You have to keep that in mind when the activists drive you up the wall. The activists and the poor are not the same people.

We went to the Jesuit charity organization's annual gala last night and had a reasonably good time, save for the fact that I wished I was dead. We'd tied one on the previous night and then my stubborn body woke me at 0340 that morning. I felt like an extra in The Walking Dead. I sat through their self-congratulatory speeches in a numb haze with my usual curmudgeonly disagreeableness, but despite my exhaustion, I managed to have an epiphany.

The first speaker that triggered my thinking was our auxiliary bishop. He talked about "marginalized communities." It finally hit me why I hate that term. I mean I hate it. I really, really hate it. But why?

"Marginalized" is the past tense of "to marginalize." That is a verb and it represents actions and intentions that are performed by people. We'll call them "marginalizers." As he spoke about helping marginalized communities, he painted a picture of the Jesuit volunteers giving succor to innocent victims of injustice. Their situations weren't something caused by their own decisions or the vagaries of fate, they were done to them, done by marginalizers.

Just who was he talking about? Well, as a straight, white, conservative, Christian, Southophilic man, I knew he was talking about me. The talks had enough references to various racial groups to make that implicit accusation very nearly explicit. 

Similarly, other speakers talked about working for "justice." That word hardly needs a context to figure out that they're implying the existence of villains who are inflicting injustice on the poor, the homeless, the addicts and the refugees. And just who might be those villains? Decades of PAO-pumped history months at work for every racial and sexual group but mine left me no doubt that I was the villain.

When they trotted out some woman who had spent years working hard to help the illegals, I wondered if it might save time to bring on a marginalizer who committed injustice to speak instead. I mean, if the problem is that the marginalized are suffering as a result of marginalization, wouldn't it be better in the long run if we stopped the marginalizing? Maybe we could talk to some marginalizers, find out why they were marginalizing and get them to back off. 

It would be a much better use of your time and money and you'd do a lot more for the marginalized if you stopped the problem at the source.

Yeah, that's not happening. It would require them to humanize the marginalizers and to do that, you'd have to understand their needs and feelings. Who wants to do that? What if you found out that the marginalized are really just the stupid, lazy and/or unlucky? Then you'd only being doing the work of God and not joining a mighy crusade against evil. That's just a grind where you fight against an infinite ocean of misfortune instead of heroically waving your flag as you do battle with unjust marginalizers.

A great movement can exist without a belief in God, but never without a belief in the devil.

Over the past year, I've seen white anger rising online and heard it more and more from popular commentators. It's not the racist "white rage" that woke dingledork Mark Milley is on about, it's feedback from people who have been unjustly painted as villains their whole lives.

See also: Adams, Scott.

The final speaker of the night mentioned the "divisions in out country" without realizing that the Jesuits and some of their volunteers are the source of those divisions. As they stood up there talking about how great they were, they kept kicking me in the groin. Frankly, like many, many others, I've had enough of that.

This how you get the Klan. You group people by race and sexuality, then you take one of those groups and blame them for everything. That gets you memes like this.

It speaks a truth, one the Jesuits and their people need to hear before we really get divisive.

What if, instead of talking about justice and marginalized communities which imply the existence of groups of villains, we told stories like the one below? My heart goes out to the family. Nothing is said about the causes of the family's separation, nothing needs to be said. The video speaks of the desperate need children have for an intact, traditional family. The child's joy at finally being able to have one after 12 years of anticipation is palpable. It must have been like Christmas morning times 100.

This 12 year-old is meeting his incarcerated father for the first time ever. He’s only seen pictures until this day. How would you describe this boy’s anticipation/reaction? God Behind Bars is a ministry that reunites children with their incarcerated dads. This changes lives! pic.twitter.com/C2Bp9b36f6

— Anthony B. Bradley, PhD (@drantbradley) March 26, 2023