Originally posted by cnovav on October 06, 2021 15:56
This is happening now because of how fast the country is moving. In other words, things are changing, socially at least. It’s no longer an expectation that everyone lives the same lifestyle in the US. For some reason, that’s such a scary idea for them. For example, Robert Ray, a Neo-Nazi, spoke about how they need to get the country back because the country is “their” (referring to the white man) because it was founded by a bunch of white men also. Robert Ray and so many other people who think just like them are threatened by the fact that there are people who look and live differently than they do. They believe that the growing groups and organizations are all against them and want to rob them of “their” country. This is how the people from January 6, 2021 thought as well. They strongly believed that President Biden was against them (because that’s what President Trump convinced them) and was going to take the country from them and give it to minority groups and so they resorted to violence.
The different groups that are protesting view the world in very different ways because of the way they have experienced the world. In the video one group is referred to as the “alt right” and the other can be referred to as the “alt left”. Members of the alt right constantly express their need to get rid of who they refer to as criminals. Those people are typically minorities, for example: black people, members of the LGBTQ+ community, different religious groups, etc. This is most likely because the life that they know so well, is a very conservative lifestyle. They have stuck to a pretty uniform and “normal” lifestyle where they are not exposed to people who are different from them. Because they don’t know much about the other people and their experiences, if a small group of those people commit crimes, they assume that the entire group is made up of criminals. Unfortunately they turn to violence and hate to “fix” the situation. The alt left is typically the group consisting of people who have experienced the exact opposite. They’ve lived around people who are very different and therefore have become more accepting of different groups of people. So as seen in the video, they want to fight back against the hateful rhetoric being spewed at themselves and others who are similar and/or different to them.
When we looked at the various documents in class, it was a common theme among the documents that people are forced to fit themselves into a certain category racially and/or ethnically. The documents that asked you to bubble in an answer would almost always have very vague options that would easily fit everyone or very specific options that only allowed a select number of people to fit into the category. This further supports the idea that many people today want to remain as conservative as possible and force people into as few groups as possible. This could possibly be because certain groups feel threatened by the formation or acknowledgement of other groups. But it could also be because of their fear of losing what they’re so accustomed to without realizing the hate they are helping spread.
I like how you mentioned that society has been moving fast, and I think that that plays a big factor into this phenomenon. I also like how you stated that people are forced to fit themselves into certain catagories, since many people deal with this problem today. This draws them away from their true identity, and also may cause people to hide who they really are out of fear.