Liberals Are Exhausting

I’m in a group for liberals on Facebook and while I love being in there, and I love the people in there, it is truly exhausting.

Today a woman posted a meme. It was cute, funny, and like all memes it wasn’t written to be a dissertation on being human.

Immediately people started in with, “Not everyone is like this” and “It’s my opinion but…” Y’all. It’s a meme. Memes are a quick laugh or cringe or eye roll and then we move along. If we can infer the context of what is being expressed, that’s enough. See how exhausting that sentence is? If we get what the meme is saying, it’s a good meme. Hard stop.

Being Liberal Is Exhausting

You know what I hate about being liberal? The way we cut each other down every chance we get. We’re so damn smug that we can’t let people be human. If people aren’t 100% perfect in 100% of what they say, we have to correct them. It’s like we’re cutting each other with hundreds of tiny razors every single chance we get and we’re somehow better for it because we all have our own opinions and that makes it okay.

It’s not okay. I will always be liberal, I will always want more for people than what they have. But good god is it exhausting. We are exhausting. We are people who don’t need anyone else to keep us down because we are happy to stand on the backs of one another saying things like, “Well, actually…” and “That’s my opinion.” 

I don’t actually blame the far right anymore. Like, good on y’all for being nazi’s and shit and bringing back white supremacy and turning women into brood mares. The far right at least stands together in their hate and incredibly offensive ideology.

We liberals are so excited about making sure everyone’s perfect that we swarm around missteps like ants eating sugar bait not realizing it’s going to kill us.

I get it – right now we are all fired up. We can’t believe what’s happening in the world, we’re feeling hurt and unseen and miserable. Every single one of us wants to start sending our bloody menstrual products to governors like Greg Abbott as proof that we, indeed, are not pregnant this month.

God bless the women who figure out a way to do that without going to prison because I swear y’all will be my heroes. 

Our hurt and anger over everything that’s happened in recent years has made us intolerable. Our agendas are set in stone.

One person stands on a box for LGBTQ rights. Someone else stands on a box for animal rights.

Others stand on a boxes for healthcare. But as we all stand on our boxes, we’re looking at the other boxes and trying to whittle them down to be a better version of what we think they should look like. Trying to make them look and sound more like us.

We’ve all seen people posting pictures of The Handmaid’s Tale and others jumping to correcting them because marginalized communities have experienced forced birth for years.

A friend will share their deep and painful abortion story and we all jump on correcting them because they accidentally said ‘women’ in the context of giving birth instead of ‘people’. 

Someone will talk about how they’re grateful to not have to wear a mask all the time in this heatwave and we all jump on correcting them because COVID is still a thing and how dare they not want heat stroke.

Instead of lifting each other up, we’ve all become the mean girls we hated in high school.

YES, we’re fine in wanting to correct these things. We want to remind people that white women are coming into a battle that has been waged against brown bodies for centuries. And that it’s not only women who bleed.

We want to care for our more vulnerable friends and family in the face of a deadly virus. BUT, we don’t have to cut down every single post or comment every single time. It’s okay to scroll. Don’t like what someone wrote? Write your own. Don’t like a meme? Make your own.

Seriously, we are exhausting.

We don’t need a political opponent at the rate we’re going, because we truly are our own worst enemies. But sure, let’s keep at it. Let’s fight every misstep or misspoken word like it’s a capital offense. And while we’re at it let’s all be sure our boots are nice and shiny, because at the rate we’re going, we’ll be goose-stepping by next Christmas.