[quotes] Strangers in Their Own Land - Arlie Russell Hochschild 2016

 

"We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the "other" side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it's on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin."

"Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don't know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt."

"An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances."

"But shame didn't stop those who disapproved of public services from using them."

"'Oh, liberals think that Bible-believing Southerners are ignorant, backward, rednecks, losers. They think we're racist, sexist, homophobic, and maybe fat.'"

"He knew liberal Democrats wanted him to care more about welfare recipients, but he didn't want their PC rules telling him who to feel sorry for."

"For the Arenos, religious faith has moved into the very cultural space in which politics might have played a vital, independent role. Politics hand't helped, they felt, and the Bible surely had."

"The Arenos had become stay-at-home migrants. They had stayed. The environment had left."

"I think they overregulate the bottom because it's harder to regulate the top."

"I heard a great deal about freedom in the sense of freedom to - to talk on your cellphone as you drove a car, to pick up a drive-in daiquiri with a straw on the side, to walk about with a loaded gun. Bu there was almost no talk about freedom from such things as gun violence, car accidents, or toxic communities around the 'self regulated' plants."

"Just as Berkeley hippies of the 1960s felt proud to be "above consumerism," to demonstrate their higher ideals of love and world harmony - even though they often depended on the parental money they were 'above' - so too Mike Schaff and other Tea Party advocates seemed to be saying, 'I'm above the government and all its services' to show the world their higher ideals, even though they used a host of them."

"Liberals were telling Americans to 'feel sorry' for recipients, but those were coastal urban liberals trying to impose their feeling rules on older Southern and Midwestern Christian whites."

"This offers a much desired private sector social world - one party based on a different worship: work."

"Word from the Lake Charles pulpits seemed to focus more on a person's moral strength to endure than on the will to change the circumstances that called on that strength."

"Fox gives Madonna and others the news. It suggests what the issues are. It tells her what to feel afraid, angry, and anxious about."

"It's scary to look back; there are so many behind you, and in principle you wish them well."

"Liberals are saying your ideas are outmoded, sexist, homophobic, but it's not clear what their values are."

"If you can no longer feel pride in the United States through its president, you'll have to feel American in some new way - by banding with others who feel as strangers in their own land."

"You are strangers in your own land. You do no recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored. And to feel honored you have to feel - and feel seen as - moving forward. But trough no fault of your own, and in ways that are hidden, you are slipping backward."

"racism refers to the belief in a natural hierarchy that places blacks at the bottom, and the tendency of whites to judge their own worth by distance from that bottom."

"Meanwhile, the nearly all-male ares of life - the police, the fire department, parts of the U.S. military, and the oil rigs - needed defending against this cultural erosion of manhood."

"All these social movements left one group standing in line: the older, white male, especially if such a man worked in a field that didn't particularly help the planet. He was - or was soon becoming - a minority too."

"On the heels of these movements for social change, a certain culture of victimization had crept in."

"Across the whole land, the idea is, handouts should stop. The richer around the nation will become free of the poorer. They will secede."

"Such scapegoating reinforces the joyous unity of the gathering. The act of casting out the 'bad one' helps fans unite in a shared sense of being the 'good ones,' the majority, no longer strangers in their own land."

"'The major fault line in American politics,' Reich predicts, 'will shift from Democrat versus Republican to anti-establishment versus establishment.' The line will divide those who 'see the game as rigged and those who don't'."

[quotes] I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou 1969

 

"It seemed that youth had never happened to them. Boys? No, rather men who were covered with graves' dust and age without beauty or leaning."

"Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood."

"but I knew I was as clearly imprisoned behind the scene as the actors outside were confirmed to their roles."

"It was simply a small pattern in the grand design of our lives. If other children didn't move so much, it just went to show that our lives were fated to be different from everyone else's in the world."

"I probably hoped that after I had heard all the sounds, really heard them and packed them down, deep in my ears, the world would be quiet around me."

"That was a totally new idea to me, and I would need time to think about it."

"She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations."

"For a few seconds it was a tossup over whether I would laugh (imagine being named Hallelujah) or cry (imagine letting some white woman rename you for her convenience)."

"Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives."

"I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed."

"Anyone I reckoned, sufficiently afraid or sufficiently dull could be polite. But to be able to operate at a top level with both adults and children was admirable."

"so which concrete angel glued to what country seat had decided that if my brother wanted to become a lawyer he had to first pay penance for his skin"

"We were maids and farmers, handymen and washer-women, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous."

"As a species, we were an abomination. All of us."

"'I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty of give me death."

"'Annie, my policy is I'd rather stick my hand in a dog's mouth than in a nigger's.'"

"When the spell wore off he asked Uncle Willie what colored people had done to white people in the first place."

"Through food we learned that there were other people in the world."

"Each day she faced us with a clean slate and acted as if ours were clean as well."

"Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective."

"With the optimism of ignorance I thought that the morning was bound to bring a more pleasant solution."

"I reasoned that I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss."

"But the need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind."

"'That's what you want to do? Then nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you've got. I've told you many times, "Can't Do is like Don't Care." Neither of them have a home.'"

"I went further than forgiving the clerk, I accepted her as a fellow victim of the same puppeteer."

"Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware. And the worst part of my awareness was that I didn't know what I was aware of."

"Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with superior forces of maturity."

"But it's mean to watch someone enjoy something and not show your understanding of their enjoyment."