Pariahs Of Their Block

A reader writes:

I’m asking you to keep me anonymous, because I just don’t feel like I’m up for any potential social justice drama, especially considering where I currently live.

I am a right of center but mostly conventionally and reverent Catholic  (Mass the way it was intended, in Latin, I feel that people like us don’t have a political home in the 21st-century).

I am married with two young children, and my wife and I live in an upper middle class, progressive neighborhood, in a large northeastern city. I work in what we might call “the culture industry“ so I am quite familiar with “corporate wokeness”, but I have been able to coexist peacefully if uneasily with it for several years I’m my professional life.

Now, my neighbors are also overwhelmingly liberal, but we also had (past tense) good relationships, mainly because my wife and I are too afraid to share some of our more “conservative” political opinions. I’ve often prayed if I should actually engage some of them about the problems of the inner city ghettos thugs (I’m sorry, but there’s no other word for some of these people) , and the deep, dark, even demonic zeitgeist of secularism in today’s America.

But overall, I have not “gone there”, and up until June, my family felt safe and “tolerated“ if not embraced, even though we were a distinct political minority.

The George Floyd protests changed all of that. About a week after the riots started, one of my neighbors emailed the street email list we use to plan block parties and told everyone she was “buying black lives matters“ signs for all of our front yards. She made it very clear that she expected all of us to put the signs in our front yard.  Of course, as you might expect, immediately many people responded enthusiastically, and within a week, literally every house on our block had a Black Lives Matter sign except for mine. I just don’t feel comfortable putting political things up, unless they are directly related to my personal theological values.

A few weeks after the signs went up, I noticed something very strange about my formerly friendly neighbors. When our family would take our daily walks down the street, people would turn their backs to us. Friendly “hellos” from us were met with stone silence. The neighbor who purchased the signs for the street was especially cold to me. After a few weeks of this, I finally confronted her, and asked her if there was some kind of problem that I should be aware of, that we could be able to talk out.

She just pointed to my house, smirked, and said “you know EXACTLY what the problem is.“ Then she walked away.

So now we’ve been ostracized by our neighbors for weeks, and have decided to join thousands of other people in fleeing American cities. They have become completely impossible to live in, unless you are willing to drop all of your values and embrace progressivism. The “for sale” sign in front yard is now a sad reminder to me of this. We’ve had enough. How many more of us are there? I wonder.

I know you are now have finished a book project about “soft totalitarianism“ and I felt that our painful story might be an example of the kind of thing you have been discussing. Feel free to share this, but please leave my name out of it. Thank you again, for all that you do for people like me.

UPDATE: Just heard from a friend, who said he just got home from hanging out with a bunch of his buddies tonight. The group expressed lots of exasperation with wokeness, which is hitting some of the guys at work. It’s on everybody’s mind, even the least political members of the group. Said my friend, of the current cultural moment, it “clearly has moved a couple of the guys from ‘I’m sitting this one out’ to voting for Trump.”

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