Weaponizing Discomfort
My longest teaching job was at a community college in a region that ideologically, if not geographically, belonged to the Bible Belt. My co-workers were, for the most part, tender-hearted people whom I remember fondly. But an interesting thing happened when, towards the end of Obama’s second term, we met as a faculty to discuss the college’s new policies on trans-genderism.
We were part of a network of public colleges in a blue state, and the institutional expectation was that we would be sensitive, tolerant and respectful. Not all of the impetus for this was top-down. People who teach at community colleges tend to be gentle souls, and they develop parental feelings for most of the students who cross their paths. I never at that school heard any venom directed at gay students, although I heard some directed at gay politicians. Gay marriage had just been legalized nationally, and gay rights had been part of the political landscape for some time. While my colleagues might not all have celebrated these developments, they had mostly gotten used to them. But it was different when we started to talk about trans people.
I didn’t see foam-at-the-mouth hatred. I didn’t see the despicable nastiness which, in a movie scene, would have established the identity of the villain. What I saw, especially among my colleagues over forty, was discomfort. They didn’t understand an overpowering urge to alter one’s gender. They didn’t understand why a person couldn’t just call themselves either a man or a woman. They felt very, very queasy at the idea of surgically removing certain body parts. Some were terrified by the idea of a man in a woman’s bathroom. This was all very new, and they didn’t get it.
What a person “gets” is the key to a lot of things. When it came to Blacks or women, my colleagues could understand wanting the same rights as anybody else – we all know what it’s like to desire fairness. When it came to gay people, my colleagues could understand that who you fall for is beyond your control – we’ve all experienced the unruliness of sexual attraction. But to rebel against your own anatomy, to find it intolerable – they didn’t get that. And what we don’t get, we find easy to fear.
A few years ago, after moving away to a new, more liberal city, I was in the checkout line at my local supermarket. A few lanes down, a cashier and a customer were trying to work through some sort of payment snarl. No one was being a jerk or losing their temper. It was an extremely ordinary event, although perhaps a bit irritating if you happened to be behind that guy in line, which I was not. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have given it a second thought.
But there were two circumstances which made this incident a bit different. The first was that I was having a bad day. I don’t remember why, but I remember I was feeling bad about myself. Probably it was something at work: I had a new job that wasn’t going very well. In any case, for whatever reason, I was feeling inadequate.
The other key circumstance was that the customer at the other checkout lane – a big, burly, bearded fellow with a lot of visible body hair – was wearing a summer sun dress.
As I say, nobody was being unreasonable or obnoxious. But as I witnessed the payment snafu, I found myself thinking hostile thoughts towards the guy in the sun dress. He wasn’t doing anything to me. He wasn’t doing anything to anyone. He wasn’t being abrasive or unpleasant. He was just trying to get his coupons scanned. But my inner monologue about him turned ugly, in a way that made me uncomfortable. I did not in any way act upon those thoughts. I like to think that if anyone had been unkind to this man, I would have stood up for him. But still, the thoughts ran around in my head, and later I tried to figure out why.
I believe I did not know how to reconcile the beard and the body hair with the sun dress. That combination did not compute. We process the strangers we encounter: we sort them into categories for ease of handling. If the categorization goes smoothly, we feel comfortable. But with this man, the categorization did not go smoothly, and I felt out of my depth. When you’re already feeling inadequate, being out of your depth can seem like drowning. And when you’re drowning, you tend to thrash.
The older we get, the more discomforts we acquire. These new technologies – uncomfortable. These new terminologies – uncomfortable. These new attitudes towards this, that and the other thing – uncomfortable. As a person nearing the end of his seventh decade, I can attest that flexibility becomes more and more elusive. The rigidity of the old is what makes us grumpy: we want to stop the world, to wind it back to what, in the old days, we could handle. Newness pulls us out of our depth. And that isn’t just true for old people. It’s true for anyone who’s set in their ways.
Not all discomforts, however, become weaponized. If I start to vent about a software update, someone will try to soothe my discomfort. The combination of old dogs and new tricks will often activate the charity of the young. Plus there’s customer support, which has a commercial motive to keep us happy. With many of our discomforts, the world tries to help us out and calm us down.
But suppose somebody wants votes?
At the college where I taught, many of my colleagues would go home and consume large quantities of right-wing media. That media did not attempt to assuage their discomforts. It attempted to intensify them.
Suppose, while I looked at that man in the sun dress, someone had come along and whispered in my ear how disgusting he was, how perverted. Suppose someone had said, “I think he teaches at a pre-school.” My discomfort might have morphed into something more problematic. A person who had my ear might have been able to work me up into a lather. And before I knew it, I might have been cruising the web, devouring fantasies about the terrible things done to children by bearded men in sun dresses.
My colleagues, at that meeting on trans policy, didn’t start out filled with hatred. But a skilled hand might have gotten them there. One way to capture a mind is to weaponize its discomforts.
~ STUDEBAKER (Studebaker@studebakerguy.bsky.com)