7: reaction to dream, part one

The Stephen Duncombe book really struck me at a level that surprised myself. Mostly because I could see myself in it. And not in a particularly flattering way.

When my mom, sister and I were making the trek back from Guelph to my hometown (which, may I preface with the fact that my town loves its conservatism, gas guzzling luxury vehicles purchased with sweet, sweet, nuclear power money and large trucks for the country kids thrown into the mix for kicks) for reading week, we were being tailgated by someone driving a Hummer. This garnered my response of: “Driving a Hummer automatically makes you an asshole,” and thusly started my shtick about why SUVs are killing the planet, blah blah blah.

Later, I went on to yell about why I thought drinking bottled water made you an asshole, all while making my eloquently planned out argument about how you shouldn’t try to commodify something that is a right, further blah blah blah.

My sister finally looked at me and said “So okay, in your world, there would be no sweet cars or ways to drink when you are not near a fountain. Your world would be terrible, and you are the asshole.”

I really tried to downplay the fact that I got metaphorically body slammed by my younger sister and her shoddy argument, but the fact was, in all respects, I was being an asshole. When I read this passage in Dunbcombe’s book, I stopped and said to myself “Dear god, this is you.”

Think of how progressives often frame their demands for ending dependence on fossil fuels: don’t buy a sport utility vehicle, don’t drive over 55 miles per hour, don’t waste gas. Don’t, don’t, don’t. …It’s fun to drive fast: one feels invincible in an SUV, and bare skin is sexy. This doesn’t mean that wasting energy should be celebrated, only that it is worth figuring out way people do it before simply condemning, regulating, and repressing (34-5).

So for all of my good intentions, I was actually coming off as an elitist to both of them. Everything that I feel was positive that I had to say was paired with this looming negative. Rather than demonstrating what was positive about my ideas, such as the all important ability to breathe freely, I was completely isolating them and probably making them feel as if they were the targets, and therefore wanted no part in it.

When you’ve become disenfranchised with the way things are going, I guess it’s easier to feel the negative because, at your most base level, sometimes that’s the only thing that you feel you have. I lead myself to believe that all of the injustices and reprehensible things that I saw as an immediate issue would resonate in the same place for everyone as it did for me.

My intention was completely lost in the fact that the only thing that I knew how to do was to preach: Preach about how Hummers make the atmosphere cry sulpheric tears, how bottled water will probably give you cancer –cancer you paid for, at that. And it didn’t stop there. For as long as I’ve distanced myself from my family’s politics in lieu of my own, I’ve probably been slapping them in the face with my rhetoric rather than finding ways for them to relate with them. Rather than guiding, I’ve been sort of punishing them with my ideas.

I think on a whole, I’m going to be able to apply Duncombe’s book on a much smaller level to myself. He states: “…progressives need to think less about presenting facts and more about how to frame these facts in such a way that they make sense and hold meaning for everyday people” (10). If I can’t be fun, if my message can’t be interesting or engaging or anything to anyone else but myself, then what’s the point of having a message?