My mayor, Keith Wilson of Portland, made a great point over the weekend in the midst of Trump’s attack on the city that’s stuck with me.
To paraphrase, since I’ve heard multiple versions of it, “Imagine if instead he sent hundreds of engineers, hundreds of teachers, or hundreds of addiction specialists.”
Trump has no interest in improving America, only in being a strongman dictator.
The problem is the local yokels outside the city don’t see this as a good point, but as him being a sniveling fool who needs a Real Man like Trump to run his city. And that’s because they have a very different worldview.
Most same people, like us, see being bad or good as something you do, and as such, with proper care and help and education you can do better.
They, on the other hand, see bad and good as something you are, a sort of fundamental birth stat that can never change. That’s why they think these ICE raids are a good thing, that’s why they want prisons to just be wholly punitive, that’s why they’re fine with writing off whole groups. Because those people are Bad, and so they will always do Bad Things, and only naive fools think that Bad People can become Good.
The really troubling part of their worldview, though, is a lot of them seem to think Bad radiates out from these people/groups and infects things around them.
My mayor, Keith Wilson of Portland, made a great point over the weekend in the midst of Trump’s attack on the city that’s stuck with me.
To paraphrase, since I’ve heard multiple versions of it, “Imagine if instead he sent hundreds of engineers, hundreds of teachers, or hundreds of addiction specialists.”
Trump has no interest in improving America, only in being a strongman dictator.
The problem is the local yokels outside the city don’t see this as a good point, but as him being a sniveling fool who needs a Real Man like Trump to run his city. And that’s because they have a very different worldview.
Most same people, like us, see being bad or good as something you do, and as such, with proper care and help and education you can do better.
They, on the other hand, see bad and good as something you are, a sort of fundamental birth stat that can never change. That’s why they think these ICE raids are a good thing, that’s why they want prisons to just be wholly punitive, that’s why they’re fine with writing off whole groups. Because those people are Bad, and so they will always do Bad Things, and only naive fools think that Bad People can become Good.
The really troubling part of their worldview, though, is a lot of them seem to think Bad radiates out from these people/groups and infects things around them.