It’s always interesting to see a person of the left encounter leftism in action.
Last year, in a meeting at work, a guy on my team was complaining about how Lyndale Avenue in his very liberal neighborhood of Minneapolis was reworked from a four-lane road into a two-lane road.
Here is how Lyndale Avenue is described on Wikipedia:
“After their junction at 56th Street West, the road becomes a divided two-lane roadway across Minnehaha Creek and north toward Uptown. Near the intersection with Lake Street, it becomes a four-lane again, a major commercial street which remains continuous until the Virginia Triangle.”
This construction to a two-lane road makes the street very busy at certain times of the day, and in fact, the street would often become gridlocked where cars couldn’t turn onto the street or cross Lyndale because of backed up traffic. For the people who live in that neighborhood, any kind of driving during rush hour gets very difficult.
As he was talking about this issue, my co-worker’s face got red as he got more and more angry. He said that he would personally campaign for someone who would run against the council members who voted for this change to Lyndale.
A woman I work with who was also in the meeting, defended the roadway planners. (Her husband works for a suburban office that makes these kinds of construction decisions.) She said that municipalities schedule public meetings where people can argue against these changes if they don’t like them.
It didn’t occur to me to say this in the moment, but afterwards I thought, “What a screwed-up system if the only way for the public to stop bad road and city planning ideas is to attend public meetings.” Shouldn’t the public be secure in knowing that the people who get these jobs would be looking out for the interests of the people in the neighborhoods they serve? But we live in a time when road designers hate the fact that people travel in cars on roads. We live in a time when teachers are more interested in indoctrinating kids than educating them.
Similarly, we live in a time when committees are organized at people’s workplaces to implement policies that only one percent of the population even cares about. At my work, there is an OfficeVibe email that comes out once a week for employees to respond to a short survey of five questions about how they are doing at work. There is also a chance to make a comment about things that could be improved at work. Well, as night follows day, an email like this shows up in my inbox:
Subject: Idea from an OfficeVibe comment coming to life! Greetings; There was a comment in OfficeVibe that shared appreciation of the things Think Small has that are noticed by the LGBT community—like our uni-sex restrooms. The person making the suggestion was open to brainstorm and so [we] met so she could share her research and ideas. . . . Another thing she mentioned (that I’ve seen other organizations do), is add pronoun preferences to the email signatures. We’ve decided to make this a voluntary option for staff and have a template for how it would look (see below). The other pronoun options could be ‘he/him/his’ or ‘they/them/theirs’.
Even working for a left-of-center organization, I was surprised by this kowtowing to the latest leftist fads. I have no intention of playing the stupid pronoun game. But it shows that ideologically impassioned people are always looking to foist their views on the rest of society and by any means. The average person who assumes that commonsense people are still in charge will find out that he is wrong.
I have come up with a brief couplet to best help me navigate these dangerous times:
Acceptance, not approval.Tolerance, not celebration.
Following the ideas behind these two lines can allow me to be in this society, but not to surrender to it.
