Having just published a book on the white-hot passions that trivial cultural fare arouse in those who steep themselves in the activist’s milieu, I thought I’d seen it all. In dissecting all the ways in which this cohort has imposed soul-crushing politics on sports, fashion, food, entertainment, sex, alcohol, the family, and even casual conversation, I believed I had covered the waterfront. It turns out that I missed a spot. As the Washington Post informed us on Thursday, even the exceedingly banal conversations that you used to have with your neighbors about something as boring as the weather have become a political minefield that only masochists would dare traverse.
“As the political becomes increasingly personal, the line where polite conversation stops and activism starts has blurred,” the Post’s dispatch opined. “Weather is the newest topic—along with politics, religion, and sex—to avoid at those awkward Thanksgiving dinners.” That is not because your family has become hypersensitive to the subject matter, of course. It is because they’re not hypersensitive enough. They must, therefore, be badgered into a state of anxiety that mirrors the perpetual agitation to which climate-change activists succumb.
“It’s time to break with social convention,” one such activist declared. Among the conventions that need breaking, it seems, is the one that rewards basic seemliness. “Any conversation can be viewed as an opportunity for a political intervention,” said another life of the party. After all, as the Post contended, “small talk facilitates denial.” Even if you forego the sanctimonious lecture that you just know your interlocutors deserve, it is an ethical failure to allow anyone in your immediate surroundings to enjoy even one carefree moment. “We all have a moral duty to do what we can,” the activist continued. The alternative is to allow “willful ignorance” to flourish.
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