I can be angry without being hateful…

I struggle a lot to find the right words when writing about any topic, and given how often I'm misunderstood, I feel like a piss poor writer. It doesn't help that often someone else will come along and sum up my ideas more succinctly than I ever could. I suppose that on the good side, this means I will never reach the point of thinking of myself as a great writer, because I always feel short of my intended goals.

One such example came last night on Twitter, a tweet made by @profsusurro (sic):

Oppression makes me rage & that rage is an engine but radical love has to be it's fuel

And this, I think, sums up just about everything about me. I'm not just committed to freeing my people from oppression, but in freeing all people everywhere from this tired system of control. I get angry because we as a people are not making progress. In fact, looking at the current governments and their schemes to disassemble free speech using copyright laws, I think we're losing ground to our rich oppressors.

But despite the amount of hate that goes into oppression, I don't want to turn the tables or make anyone into my servants as revenge. I'm not motivated to act based on a need to return the favors done to me in the past. I'm motivated by the hope that a new generation of kids like me will grow up never knowing the hatred I suffered daily at the hands of "good people."

My enemies will always try to flip this around, claiming that I am trying to destroy society and everyone's way of life. And this has the partial ring of truth to it, which is why the message sticks and works with so many fearful privileged peoples. I do want to destroy your oppressive society, and if I could succeed, the world would never be the same as you previously understood it. But it would not be an evil world. It would be a world full of love and acceptance instead of grudging tolerance. (Which some of you claim is the best you can offer to anyone who doesn't share your exact same views.)

But in that new world, there would not be prisons full of white people serving time for their racism. There would not be a court of homophobia leading witch hunts to find out which straights were still intolerant of sexual diversity. There would be none of the CCTV cameras mounted on every pole like there is now. There would not be police harassment of anyone, not like we see with the cops when dealing with POC today. The world I want to see without oppression has no punishment cooked up for the people who willfully helped enable oppressors to keep working unchecked for centuries.

I don't really believe I'll see a world without oppression in my time. Far too many people are busy using false victim cards to claim that they deserve the right to oppress others. They're just "returning the favor," and the fact that the oppressed have done nothing at all to the person using this logic is irrelevant. It can't be your fault that opression is still going on, so it must be the fault of minorities, for making a big deal out of "little things." If us uppity minorities would just learn our places, you claim, then the world would be perfect. But I can't help but notice how your perfect world still includes rampant slavery, fear mongering, and a steady supply of wars to keep the world populations in check.

You people who practice willful oppression of minorities rage about the unfairness of losing even a little privilege, and the fuel for your engine is unreasoning hate. You have no reason to hate other people, but you do anyway.

I have reasons to hate. I've had bones broken, had my will crushed and oppressed in the name of gender conformity. I've had people who claimed to love me tell me that they would prefer it if I remained unhappy, because they were happier with my false gender than they were with me being myself. To them, they saw no big deal in attacking my choices and pushing me to conform, even if it would make me miserable. Their happiness and need to oppress comes before my right to pursue happiness.

I have very, very good reasons to hate, but I don't. I am angry, a lot. I get outraged by watching "good people" attack others who are beneath them, simply because they can. I get angry that these same people feign innocence or ignorance of their crimes when called on it, and then turn around and use being called out as a further sign that they're "the real victim here."

People like this actively oppress, and then deny that this is what they're doing. So I have very good reasons to be angry at these inhumane, lazy, stupid people. They could educate themselves to stop being stupid. They could work to overcome their laziness and inhumanity. But their conditions are willful, and anyone like me attempting to point this out will be attacked. Why? Because none of you wants to admit that you're the problem. Oppression isn't your problem. It's for some elected officials to fix, someday, perhaps after the budget is balanced and all white people have good jobs. But it has nothing to do with you people, even if you are actively oppressing someone and living in denial about it.

But I don't hate you. I don't want to turn the tables and make you as miserable as you've made me over the years. I just want you to stop hurting others. I want you to accept that you are harming others, and I want you to strive to be as humanitarian as you claim to be when pressed about your privilege. And if loving you and expecting better from you is wrong, then people, I don't ever want to be "right" with you.

All we need is love. It's already my fuel of choice, so maybe you should think about changing from your current fuel over to something that can really change our world for the better. Hate and fear have always shaped patriarchal societies, so perhaps when we convince the men to share the role of leadership, we can also convince them to drop their favorite weapon of FUD.