With a little bit of luck, someone else will do the blinkin’ work!
This is only a small sampling of the outpouring of organically-generated solidarity on display since the verdict came down. As you continue reflecting and “reckoning” and educating yourself, remember to seek out additional examples from your favorite faceless institutions. Then you may resume watching Netflix and ordering DoorDash.
The Lady of the House is far more Montaignean than I am, funny enough. She’s sanguine and genuinely interested in a wide variety of people. She greets idiosyncrasy and eccentricity with a beaming smile and a “How interesting!” Unfortunately, the times being what they are, this means she has several people in her orbit who belong to the herd of independent minds. Unique, quirky individuals all, with ironically identical opinions and rhetorical tropes. The socially-just have a cultish vernacular, as most of us probably know. It’s like the unholy offspring of empty corporate buzzwords and what Tracey calls “therapeutic trauma jargon.” I don’t know exactly how I’d define it, but if I may wildly paraphrase Potter Stewart here: I know it when I hear it, and I’m not waiting around to hear any more. I’ll continue to enjoy reading Montaigne’s broadminded essays, but in my own life, I’m a rabid xenophobe. If I hear someone use that vernacular in earnest, it’s raise the drawbridge, lower the portcullis, drown them in the moat.