Why Are We Letting Conservative Bullies Strangle Our Country?
Moms for “Liberty” consider hate an American value
I read a fantastic story by Linda Caroll about book banning this morning. I mean, the story is compelling and well written. But the content? It’s disturbing — just like 1,000 other stories I read in the news daily about what’s happening in the United States right now. Hateful people — bullies — who are in the minority are pushing their far right radical conservative agenda down Lady Liberty’s throat.
Book banning or burning is an age old tactic of social control. It’s scary and powerful and shouldn’t be ignored. As Caroll says in her story:
Banning and burning books has always been one of the ways humans try to control each other.
The first emperor of the Qin Dynasty burned books back in 213 BCE. They burned books in Rome, France and Spain. Henry VIII burned books.
The Nazis burned 25,000 books on May 10, 1933. Lit a big bonfire and threw in books by Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, G. K. Chesterton, Jack London, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and more.
Are we still the “Land of the Free?”
I like the way James Finn put it in his story on the same topic:
By the way, what do we call ourselves now? If we’re not the Land of the Free anymore, can we search for some other motto? Land of the Book Burners, perhaps?
I happened to read both stories above immediately after publishing this one by Zee the snail on my feminist website about another young woman in Iran (remember Mahsa Amini?) who was beaten into a coma for not covering her hair “correctly.”
It’s not “their culture”
Some say “It’s their culture. What can we do?” But did you know that Iran didn’t always have brutal morality police?
In the 1970s, when the Shah was in charge, Iran was a beacon of modernity in the Middle East. Music, movies, literature, theater, and all kinds of art were being created there, while women were being encouraged to take OFF their headscarves.
I’m not saying it was perfect. The Shah was much criticized for bad behavior and obscene displays of wealth, and that’s part of the reason radical conservative clerics were able to take over the country in 1979 — that and a terrible economic recession which left large numbers of the people broke and unemployed.
By 1974, the economy of Iran was experiencing a double-digit inflation rate, and despite the many large projects to modernize the country, corruption was rampant and caused large amounts of waste. By 1975 and 1976, an economic recession led to an increased unemployment rate, especially among millions of youths who had migrated to the cities of Iran looking for construction jobs during the boom years of the early 1970s. By the late 1970s, many of these people opposed the Shah’s regime and began organizing and joining the protests against it. -Wikipedia
From mecca of modernity to repressive regime
I graduated from high school in 1973, so the transformation of Iran from mecca of modernity to repressive regime has taken place in my lifetime. And those people who supported the revolution back in 1979? You can bet your life they weren’t fighting for compulsory dress codes or brutal oppression of alternate points of view. Mostly, they just wanted to be able to feed their families. But once they enabled those radical conservatives to get their foot in the door…
It can happen here
So I worry. I’m worried about the same thing happening here in the United States, where the income disparity is so great that poor people are begging on the street everywhere you look.
The official poverty rate in in the U.S. in 2021 was 11.6 percent, with 37.9 million people qualifying as poor. In 2022, counts of homeless individuals (421,392 people) and chronically homeless individuals (127,768) reached record highs in the history of data collection. And even in the “middle class” living conditions have steeply declined, with young people — even those in two earner households— unable to buy their own homes.
Some say “It’s their culture. What can we do?” But did you know that Iran didn’t always have brutal morality police?
Meanwhile, we have radical “religious” zealots (who are dying to push women back into the kitchen and despise gays) parading around and flexing their muscles in government, telling us what we can and cannot say, what we can and cannot read, and what kinds of posters we can put on school walls.
And while our schools are being micro-managed by bigots who love to hate, it’s the wild, wild west on a completely uncontrolled Internet where it’s perfectly fine for sociopaths to organize campaigns to threaten librarians and teach our kids to shout “Fuck the Women” and “Death to Gays.”
You think the kind of radical turnaround that happened in Iran can’t happen here? Don’t fool yourself. That’s exactly what DT had in mind when he organized the Jan. 6 insurrection. Had he been successful, who knows what would have happened next? I guess people like these would be walking around with billy clubs and beating you into a coma if they didn’t like the way you looked.
Besides writing stories about movies, books, women, spirituality, mental illness, and politics on Medium, I edit the feminist publication Fourth Wave and I’ve published two novels here: Thirsty Work and Count All This. Check them out! And if you’re a writer with a passion for equality, submit to Fourth Wave.
