Obliviousness

This was posted on Reddit. Given that, as near as I can tell, the average user of Reddit is a left-of-center Millennial or member of "Gen Z," it was unsurprising that people were lining up to dunk on "Pro Life Lad," make their own comments concurring with said dunking on, and voting up the dunking and supportive comments.

For my part, I'm a bit skeptical, if for no other reason that if "Pro Life Lad" were bright enough to both walk and chew bubble gum, they should have seen this coming from miles away. But bait or not, the post is indicative of the ways that many people experience the Culture War phenomenon here in the United States. While there are many dedicated culture warriors, for whom inflicting pain on the perceived enemy is part of the goal, many people are simply doing what they understand to be correct, and they don't understand why people are upset with them.

And I suspect that a lot of this comes form people simply not understanding that they aren't the only ones who see this as a high-stakes matter of right and wrong. "Pro Life Lad" was apparently engaged to be married to a woman who very much disagreed with the Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et al. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Et al. decision, yet he couldn't be bothered to understand that, or how important it was to her? (I'm not married myself, and have no intention to be, so maybe I'm speaking out of turn here, but I suspect that this blindsided him, he didn't know his fiancée well enough to have proposed to her, or accepted a proposal.) It never occurred to him that this was important enough to the people he worked with that maybe a public party wasn't the best idea? His dig on the women in the local area for not being pro-life would indicate that he lives in a fairly liberal place - what was he expecting would happen?

To hazard a guess, I would presume that "Pro Life Lad" simply assumed that he'd be able to bask in whatever minuscule part he may have played in "saving babies" and ride around on his high horse without ever needing up understand how the people on the other side actually felt about the issue.

Generally speaking, people do not act in ways that they believe will call unjustified harm, if any harm at all, to others. But they also fail to understand, or be curious about, the perception that others have that harm is being done. And thus "Pro Life Lad" can celebrate, with fireworks, an event that people around them consider an act of deliberate harm, and not realize that those same people consider that to be rubbing their noses in the impending injuries of themselves and those they care about. He tells his younger sister that she should be "grateful" that he's going to have a child who will be her niece or nephew, as if it's his role to tell her what is important to her.

This particular example landed in my lap, which is why it's ending up here, but it's not a one-sided phenomenon. Rather it's fairly routine in American politics. The only thing that's potentially unusual about it is the durability of "Pro Life Lad's" echo chamber and lack of empathy for the people around him, given how deep he portrays himself as being in their world.

In a lot of ways, this is the enduing problem of American politics; a lack of understanding, or perhaps even the desire to understand, driven by people's perceptions of themselves as on the obviously correct side of whatever issue is in question. And the belief that it's only a problem for others.