While taking a walk around Hartford, I was reminded over and over why I call this city home.
When you live, work, and socialize with people from many backgrounds, it becomes a whole lot harder to dehumanize whole segments of the population.
For those in more insular (segregated) communities, this sense of solidarity might not be innate. Barriers can be overcome. This can mean education through books and films, but as we know, there is a resurgence censorship. Free speech is being battled on some college campuses. Don’t believe this is happening only somewhere way off in the distance.
The motivation for this stint of information suppression is not unlike what we’ve seen when it comes to Drag Queen Story Hour or any queer books: those with increasingly unpopular worldviews are trying to control content that might suggest, especially to younger people, that their old ways are rapidly falling out of favor.
They are desperate.
Going with the flow by saying nothing and rocking no boats feels easier, yet that’s the morally bankrupt choice. Those who’ve been raised to say “never again” to genocide know this, and they can take comfort in also knowing that there are people acting with the courage necessary in this moment. It’s uncomfortable to risk one’s reputation in this climate of new McCarthyism, yet the alternative would be a lazy façade of niceness. Being kind and being nice are not one in the same.