Plantation

Let's workshop this piece that highlights the unfairness and hypocrisy in the prevailing social dynamics where the powers that be use their claims of being powerless victims to guilt-trip everyone

---

Plantation

X people control our victim culture with a ferocity as jungle-like, despite its veneer of justice, as a lion tearing apart cubs of threatening paternities. They have hacked the zeros and ones of our guilt, masterfully weaponizing victimhood. (Think of a man, scared to get a job and allergic to taking care of himself on his own, never letting his mother forget the time she was late to pick him up at school twenty years ago, an event that left him prey to some unsavory characters.) They sink their claws of sanctimonious fury deeper and deeper, as if they had little else going for them—and even though it only serves to spoil them into humiliating and hobbling dependency, steering them from the daunting path of self-reliance and accountability for their own shortcomings.

However scientific or well-intentioned, any bad light or critical remark or challenge to their “lived truth”—so they have convinced almost everyone—amounts to heresy. Elevated to “the most vulnerable population the world has ever seen” (haloed victims of an unforgivable sin at the hands of Y people, the supposed powers that be), it is a “punching down” only a sicko monster—an unforgivable oppressor—would perpetrate. On the other hand, sweeping bigotry of Y-people has become as incessant and trendy and mindless as pop music, as trite and go-to as weather-talk to fill conversational voids.

And so when the uncompromised Y-person, an endangered rogue in this wilderness of jungle-law conformity, dares to give his friend—yet again filling the space with fashionable digs (“Ys have such little dicks” and “Ys always try to control the conversation” and “Why don’t Y-people have any rhythm?” and so on)—a taste of his own medicine (“Why do all Xs have to be so violent?”), it sends shockwaves through the “friend group.” Their faces take on looks of incredulous shock, too lost in the ideological fog to see the point of the mirroring: simply to highlight the rebarbative unfairness of heavy-handed prejudice.

With exception perhaps to the closest of family, many among the rainbow—especially the Y allies of born-again fervor—are, in fact, too swept up in the cultish trance not to be the first to shatter the mirror. They bust it to pieces for TikTok cameras with chimpanzee kicks of payback, curb stomps of European soccer. Any punishment (rarer and rarer) for their brutality—painkilling and meaning-giving, heroic-feeling and team-spirit-demonstrating—only serves to showcase in their minds how victimized they remain in a culture whose anti-Xness is baked into its very DNA.

---