I am often struck how often, at least in the US, how almost everything gets bent, twisted, and beaten to fit into one political agenda or another. I understand there is a lot of resentment when a multitude of cultures try to live amongst each other while trying to maintain their own culture. There will always be grievances and prejudices that preclude a shared understanding. Thus, if everything one culture does is ‘racist’ and gets labeled as such, racism loses its meaning. If anyone who is successful is only successful because of ‘privilege’ then privilege loses all meaning. I could go on and on in this vein, but I think I have made my point: when up becomes down, those words lose their meaning in any meaningful sense.
What I cannot abide is when words and phrases are deliberately invoked to wrap political and envy grievances in a veneer of respectability that cheapens a very real lived experience that was/is traumatic and debilitating. Today’s post is such an article. The only thing I truly appreciate about this article is it does not spout the trite cliche definition of moral injury that most articles do, it actually has some nuance.
The concept of moral injury is usually applied to the damage done to military veterans who feel an acute disconnect between what they were told was a noble cause and the horrendous things they must witness and sometimes do.
https://www.laprogressive.com/back-to-normal/
The rest of the article is simply an awful screed that showcases every trite political cliche of the revolutionary without any meaningful look at how or why those conditions might exist. The above quote was from the last paragraph and attempts to package all of the author’s political grievances into a veneer of moral injury. Discourse like the above article cheapens moral injury and strips it of meaning. To paraphrase the character Norman Beale “it makes me mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”