Outraged & in pain etc etc
Someone is watching.
I don’t want to brush off or belittle concerns about racism, but at the same time…I’ve seen too many self-righteous Letters of Outrage lately not to recognize this as another example. “Our community is outraged and in pain”? I doubt it. I bet their community was in a fever of righteous exhilaration.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe McNeil really did fling around racist insults with cheerful abandon…but I doubt it. Jesse Singal doubts it.
David Aaronovitch doubts it.
There’s a fad in my neighborhood, and for all I know in all neighborhoods, to festoon one’s front garden with yard signs carrying little homilies and love notes. I hate this fad. “Our community is outraged and in pain” is kind of those homilies and love notes turned inside out.
I’m not kidding about the love notes, either. One reads “YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE.” It’s so stupid, because it’s a yard sign – total strangers are going to be reading it. What’s the point of displaying such a meaningless slogan? And others like it? There are ones that say “DON’T GIVE UP” – but sometimes giving up is just fine, and in any case it’s our decision, not that of random neighbors we don’t know.
So one the one hand YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE, whoever you are, and on the other hand, our community is outraged and in pain and we are going to get your ass fired. Don’t give up though.
I’ve seen similar signs and believe they’re supposed to be tied in with suicide prevention…
Those yard signs sound like replacements for bumper stickers. Nobody is driving anywhere, so the bumper stickers are stationary and in bigger print.
Singal is also arguably misrepresenting the Times’s stance. First, it refers to “readers”; the McNeil case revolves around spoken words. Second, the policy says that “if an exception is essential to readers’ understanding of a highly newsworthy crime, conflict or personality, the decision should first be discussed thoroughly by senior editors” (emphasis added). I don’t know enough about this situation to have an opinion on what should have been done, but it seems clear that the stylebook guidelines don’t apply.
So someone struggling with suicidal thoughts is going to be helped in the struggle by a yard sign saying YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE? I has my doubts. I want to speak to the manager.
You should put that on a sign in your yard.
And guarantee being called a Karen?
I don’t know about elsewhere, but people around here are driving as much as ever. Well, not this week, because we had 10 inches of snow, which slows them down to about 2/3 of normal driving, but when there’s no snow, it’s just as busy. Driving around here reduced for the period of approximately one week in March, then everybody got “quarantine fatigue” and jumped back in their cars to go anywhere they could go, unmasked of course.
But we still have yard signs. The only ones I liked have been the one next door that says “Life is better with a dog” and one that was a few blocks away that started counting down Trump’s days in office from the moment he was inaugurated.
We apologize for the inconvenience. –Douglas Adams
No one said it was effective (I hope), but there it is…
Honestly, if a reporter in the 21st century is actually denying the existence of white supremacy in the U.S., then I seriously doubt their competence to actually report on anything currently happening in this country–it’d be like a health reporter being an anti-vaxxer, or a science reporter who is also a YEC. The flipside, of course, is that the accusation could actually refer to incidents where he was denying that a particular occurrence was a manifestation of white supremacy, which might at least be a defensible position (even if incorrect)–that’s the difficulty with this letter, really, that it fails to outline precise accusations.