So many headlines these days telling us about something controversial that some guy or gal said on a YouTube video or a Twitter post 10 years ago, the aim of the editors being to get our Underoos in a knot and our hands grasping at our pearls.
Aside from the fact that plenty of people hold utterly reprehensible views now, as in, today, right this second, the this person said this terrible thing 10 years ago meme is nonsense for a different reason.
That being: people grow.
Me, for instance, growing up in Augusta County in the ‘80s, I’d never been around a gay person, at least, I wasn’t aware of ever having been around a gay person.
First year at UVA, my roommate is gay.
Two semesters getting a glimpse of life through his eyes informed me for a lifetime.
If there had been social media back when I was a teen, I’d be willing to bet that I would have posted carelessly insensitive things about the LGBTQ+ community, just given where and how I was brought up.
The idea that I somehow benefitted from “white privilege” was something I scoffed at until relatively recently.
Seriously, me, privileged? The first house I lived in lacked indoor plumbing. Then we graduated to a trailer park.
Privileged?
Until I read an account of a Black father gearing up to tell his elementary school-aged son the facts of life of being Black in America.
If my only privilege is not having to worry that the cop who pulled me over for a busted taillight is going to shoot me, that’s still a helluva privilege.
I grew up in a conservative, not-even-borderline racist, gun-toting, religious family, tagging along with my grandfather to a tiny Bible church most Sundays, though none of it took with me.
I saw it for what it was then, and now that I’m free to say what I think, I’ll tell you that I have long since agreed with the sentiment expressed by Barack Obama, among others, that too many people like the people who raised me cling to their racism and guns, and use their religion to justify their approach to hating people who aren’t like them.
Me saying that now makes me unelectable to 34 percent of the population, if I were interested in ever running for public office again.
Yes, I said again there.
I actually ran for public office once, nearly 20 years ago.
The campaign of my opponent spun my background to the voters as me being a big-city plant running for a seat on the City Council in Waynesboro at the urging of out-of-town liberals.
What I wanted to say back was, Motherf—–, my people settled this part of Virginia in the 1730s.
Just because I don’t buy into rich people’s nonsense about keeping people dumb so that the elites can take it all for themselves doesn’t make me a liberal.
There you go; chop that up and use it against me in 10 years, right?
And actually, yeah, people are grasping their fake pearls and picking their bloomers out of their cracks as you finish reading this.
Point being, two-fold, I guess – people grow, and most of the time, that growth makes them see that what they once thought on the issues of the day, and how to approach living their lives, was wrong.
Don’t hold what they used to think against them.
What they think now, that’s fair game.
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Chris Graham
