Backlash in Bad Times
Beware the backlash in bad times, fellow Feminists. I've been cruising the Internet and the Men's Rightists are out in full force in the comments sections of all the best and worst blogs. One commenter said something so parallel universe to reality that it made me "lol", as they say in cyber space. "Do you know where the word Feminazi comes from? It comes from Feminists who are nazis and men who are Jews."
Phew. On the same thread where that comment occurred, I'd been just about to Godwin's Law everybody by pointing out that Men's Rightists were behaving like Nazis in their scapegoating of Feminists for their (I can't lay claim to having had any impact on the Feminist movement, myself, so I can't say "our") successful expansion of human rights beyond the chosen people (who I'm pretty sure were wealthy white Christian males - unless our entire history occurred in a parallel universe and immigrant women are over there proroguing Parliament because life is just so damn good - democracy is obsolete).
How ironic that one "Keith" would beat me to it - albeit ass backwards and upside down so's his comment was quite jarring in its inaccurate application of Godwin's Law (the first commenter to mention Nazis, the Holocaust, Hitler, etc, on a thread not about Germany's Third Reich, is said to have invoked Godwin's Law - thereby derailing the thread into official irrelevance - which is really bad considering we're already in cyber space).
And workers. My, oh my but the powers that be are betraying themselves with their all-too-waggly finger pointing at Canadian workers for daring to make good money in good times. I mean, at least we actually performed some labour, producing out-of-date gas guzzling tanks for environmentally conscious suburbanites and cutting down whole forests for the modern productive paperless offices of today and mining our mines for the foreign overlords our home and native corporations sold us out to. AND we kept our hard earned incomes in the country.
Good grief - bank presidents and corporate ceos have been giving themselves million dollar bonuses for years and hiding them offshore so they wouldn't have to pay taxes - in spite of having the same access to social programs that the rest of us pay into and I notice they aren't pointing fingers at each other. Just workers. I mean, when did "workers" become a bad word? I'll tell you when - when the New Conservatives and bankers and ceos realized they'd steered us (workers) right into a Depression.
Scapegoating is in full force, I'm afraid. Some men are looking back on a time when women didn't have rights and thinking somehow their lives would be better if we could return to those simpler times. Lots of Canadian born white Christians are looking back on a time when immigrants kept a low profile and they're thinking the same thing - simpler times would be preferable to everybody having the same rights.
Worst of all, the wealthy are looking back to when labour was cheap and people were so desperate for money they'd work for peanuts and argue over who should have the right to work harder for MORE peanuts.
But the terrifying part of it all is that those same people looking backwards to a simpler time elected their kind of government - a stupid one - so the rest of us are on our own in seeking higher ground. Gawd knows, my government doesn't represent me. In fact, it's headed in a direction opposite to everything I hold near and dear - rights that previous generations of Canadians fought long and hard to win - for ALL of us.
Beware the backlash in bad times, everybody, because it's a comin'. And if there's one thing backlash lacks, it's reason, so don't even try. Oh - and humour doesn't go over so well, either. These are not smart people we're dealing with, my friends. That's why they want to go back to simpler times.
