Alice Zimmermann
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The hippies' kids dont know what cause is ours. We were scared of really fighting against Iraq because conservatism for a while seemed so cool. Our hippie parents got all materialistic to take care of their kids and here comes our gen, growing up, not disillusioned by the fake freedom of the far left (how can we get rich and win that way?), as economic-"conservatives", social contemporaries (a.k.a. liberal, because we all grew up together didn't we?). Old-fashioned injustices like racism, homophobia, and religiosity are for the poor and dumb, and are practically dead in the new age of technology, communication, and Borat. Or so I thought.
In 2006 Fred Phelps (who believes that homosexuality and social acceptance of it have doomed most of the world to eternal damnation) came to Duke. They let him come with his gay-hating entourage to Durham and posted right outside the wall of the freshman year campus. I think he got a chance to voice his controversial views somewhere with at least a speech in an auditorium.
Though good that the university and town advocated free speech and let him stick around for a moment, at 20 I felt this was my call for civil rights advocate duty. I rallied my fellow social justice scholarship recipients to join in a protest of his views, which, as a northerner, I perceived to be virally backwards in america and especially the small-town South - in the age of Bush (which it still was of course), this guy was a real threat and not just a laughing stock!.
My email was not extraordinarily objective, as one civil rights activist fighting for integration's tone might be against a KKK rally in similar territory, 40 years previous.
I was quickly called out and reprimanded by peers and the authorities for using the scholarship program to advance a "partisan" moral system - in the name of civil rights. I was horrified, but enlightened, to read classmate responses to my message stating their offense at my position, since they too are against gayhood and believe it a route to hell and evil, as stigmatized as that position is in today's educated circles, and my denouncement of Phelps' beliefs is hurting, not helping civil rights since I was victimizing his supporter, among them, kids who got full rides in the name of community service to a top 10 university!I thought these people would be the most granola advocates of my position of all! Man, does hate grow deep.
I got in big trouble!
What seemed and continues to seem to me as "vicious, repressive, dark-ages nonsense" (to quote good magazine), I suspect, is very much so still seeing the light of day. Old news, but an anecdote I've been wanting to leak to someone since it happened :)
In 2006 Fred Phelps (who believes that homosexuality and social acceptance of it have doomed most of the world to eternal damnation) came to Duke. They let him come with his gay-hating entourage to Durham and posted right outside the wall of the freshman year campus. I think he got a chance to voice his controversial views somewhere with at least a speech in an auditorium.
Though good that the university and town advocated free speech and let him stick around for a moment, at 20 I felt this was my call for civil rights advocate duty. I rallied my fellow social justice scholarship recipients to join in a protest of his views, which, as a northerner, I perceived to be virally backwards in america and especially the small-town South - in the age of Bush (which it still was of course), this guy was a real threat and not just a laughing stock!.
My email was not extraordinarily objective, as one civil rights activist fighting for integration's tone might be against a KKK rally in similar territory, 40 years previous.
I was quickly called out and reprimanded by peers and the authorities for using the scholarship program to advance a "partisan" moral system - in the name of civil rights. I was horrified, but enlightened, to read classmate responses to my message stating their offense at my position, since they too are against gayhood and believe it a route to hell and evil, as stigmatized as that position is in today's educated circles, and my denouncement of Phelps' beliefs is hurting, not helping civil rights since I was victimizing his supporter, among them, kids who got full rides in the name of community service to a top 10 university!I thought these people would be the most granola advocates of my position of all! Man, does hate grow deep.
I got in big trouble!
What seemed and continues to seem to me as "vicious, repressive, dark-ages nonsense" (to quote good magazine), I suspect, is very much so still seeing the light of day. Old news, but an anecdote I've been wanting to leak to someone since it happened :)
