(From July 9)
Commuting home from work, I walk extra blocks to avoid a growing throng of protesters. The air is uneasy, strained with thinly veiled rage and imminent chaos.
I believe in the cause, though some days it’s hard to tell if those gathered are part of it, or if they’re just there to destroy stuff.
“They’re all scumbags,” my religious coworker grumbles, a young man who is otherwise sweet and thoughtful. “The whole movement is evil. Protesting doesn’t solve anything.”
I don’t know what to tell him. I hear his complaints often, and no matter who it’s coming from, it all sounds the same. I try to offer a more complex angle, the ever manic advocate for nuance, but my brain is freezing and I want to escape. It feels like I’m always hedging, placating and challenging, being gentle with people who refuse to return the favor. It’s my small glance behind the curtain, and it’s a wonder the revolutionaries don’t burn down the whole world for it.
At least the people you demonize are fighting, I think. Of course the resistance is offensive to your religion because the cultural bottom line of that religion for me, as a woman, was to roll over and try to be content with my suffocated place in the hierarchy. And that extended to anyone else not favored by the power structure.
Peace without justice is not peace at all. It’s hell.
And call me a brainwashed liberal, but I’d always thought it was Christianity’s duty to save people from hell.
+++
A/N: Today, deconstruction feels like this. I refuse to give the cognitive dissonance justification. I understand where this behavior from religious people is coming from, but it doesn’t get a free pass with me. Not anymore.
Odonata 