On Being [Told I am] a Special Snowflake

"Snowflake macro" by Benjamin Balázs. Public domain.

The internet is such a great place to learn about oneself!!!
 
To summarize (from my less-than-fun reading and reviewing of similarly-themed posts over the past few days):

• Those of us who initially got upset about Donald Trump's victory are spoiled rotten brats.  The fact that we continue to get upset by his nominees for cabinet merely proves this true.
• We (the brats) have had everything in life handed to us on a silver platter and this is the first--the very first!--time something hasn't gone our way.  That's why we're upset about president-elect Trump.  
• Our protests--online, in the streets, and in petitions and phone calls and posts--are nothing more than public temper tantrums intended to strong arm the government and more mature (i.e. Trump-voting) folks into giving us what we want (our way, our candidate for president).
• We, the above, are just a bunch of "special snowflakes" who all got participation trophies as children and too much self-esteem education and, by right of those facts, have neither the moral fiber nor grit to handle the hard stuff of life, nor the humility to accept defeat when it comes to us.

 
And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go look in the mirror to remind myself how special I am before writing the rest of this post.
 
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Just kidding.  Still here, all snowflakin' it up.
 
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Some thoughts regarding what I have read about myself and the legions of the disappointed and devastated like me:
 
I can't speak for all other snowflakes, but the repugnance and devastation with which I received the political catastrophes of 2016 have nothing--zero, nada, NOTHING--to do with not getting my way, and definitely nothing to do with participation trophies (which, by the way, I never got growing up.  Where's my trophy, golldurnit!?!)
 
No.  My repugnance and devastation have everything to do with what I did get as a child of the United States of America.  And there were two things in particular:
 
1) SHAME.  As a child, I learned to be ashamed of the racist, violent history of my country.  Of course I learned so while also learning to be proud of my country.  Proud of its democratic heritage and its geographical diversity.  Proud of its entrepreneurial spirit and freedom of conscience.   But I learned, in my basic public education in two different rural towns, to be appropriately ashamed of the parts of my country's story that were shameful.  

As a start, I learned to be ashamed of the participation of people who looked like me and worshipped like me in centuries of slave-owning, segregation-upholding, civil rights-resisting, and everyday acts of racism.   
 
I learned to be ashamed of my country's historical limitations on women, limitations that seemed preposterous to me as a child of the 80's with a vagina and uterus who was told I could do anything and be anything I put my mind to.
 
I learned to be ashamed of a historical reality that bothered me when I learned of it and haunts me now: my country's silence and unwillingness to get involved when it knew the German government of the 1930's and 40's was bent on discriminating against, deporting and finally annihilating the Jews of Europe.  I read all I could to understand this unfathomable mystery and, in the end, gave myself to preventing its recurrence. In 8th grade I began giving what would become regular presentations on the Holocaust to recruit my fellow students into the "Never Again" club.
 
2) CELEBRATION:  I learned to celebrate every fight, every stand, every disavowal of the acts grown from the evil seeds sown by shipping, tormenting, buying, and selling humans in the earliest days of my nation.  I celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. day as a national holiday, and thought for a long time that the adults in my life celebrated the day and the man, too.  I celebrated the progress that had been made through first black men then women of all colors earning the right to vote, and then the work of the Civil Rights Movement to ensure equal opportunity for people of every color and creed.  Later, in high school, I was privileged to hear my LGBTQ brothers and sisters talk about their experiences of discrimination and abuse, and that began a journey of learning to celebrate the expansion of their civil rights, too.
 
So yes, my "snowflakeness" was imparted to me through my childhood, but not through the talking points I hear from those bent on ridicule. My snowflakeness was imparted to me through the lesson, reinforced time and again that discrimination, racism, xenophobia, and religious prejudice are not to be tolerated or celebrated in the United States but repudiated and resisted, to the end.  
 
As a child of the church, I found a faith that crystallized these beliefs in Holy Ghosted, diamond-crusted shells, etched with words like "created in the image of God" and "love your neighbor as yourself."
 
I learned.  I believed.  I still believe.
 
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So when a race-baiting, xenophobic, maligner-of-certain-faith-practitioners candidate won the election with the help of people who look like me, who talk like me, and who worship like me, my response was consistent to what I learned as an American child and what I still believe as an American adult:
 
Shame.
 
Followed by sadness.
 
And eventually anger, and protest, and all the things that are so easy to jeer and kick at now that victory has been secured.
 
Because that victory made clear that racism and misogyny and xenophobia and religious prejudice are not, across the country, things of the past to be looked down upon and learned from.  They are real, vital forces and motivators, not sources of shame but of empowerment.
 
Likely most of the people who voted for Trump--good people, so many of them--did not vote for the platforms of prejudice or rallies of racism or admissions of assault. But they voted in spite of them.  And that, at least for me, was what was hardest to stomach.  I thought that the shared shame of our history would be enough to induce us to never return to it collectively again.  It wasn't.  And yeah, that devastated the hell out of me.  When did racism and xenophobia and assault obtain the ability to be overlooked?  How did they not provide the automatic halt of the Trump train?  
 
It was the tacit agreement to overlook these evils that got snowflakes like me out on the street and railing away on our keyboards and telephones.  It wasn't that we didn't get our own way.  It wasn’t even that our candidate(s) didn’t win.  It was that half of our shared country voted to take 50 steps back into evils we (perhaps naively but nonetheless genuinely) believed to have been shamed and rejected once and for all.
 
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I am not so naive now.  I know in December of 2016 what I did not know before November 8 of 2016.  I acknowledge that, despite having received much of the same public education as me, and despite many reading the same Bible as me, there are fellow citizens of mine who didn't come to the same conclusions.
 
So be it.  But I reject the central myth pedaled by the antagonists of the "special snowflakes", that the anger and temporary despair reveal a lack of grit or tenacity or character.  Being knocked down is not the same as never getting up.  And to my dying breath I will believe and fight for what I learned as a child in America and teach as an American adult raising my children outside of that country.
 
I believe, as the Constitution highlights (or at least hints at), that human beings are created in the image of God and, as such, are endowed with dignity and respect that should be honored and codified.
 
I believe that the ugly, repetitive catastrophe of dehumanizing, othering, and overlooking our neighbours should properly elicit shame, and that shame and anger are appropriate responses when a man is elected on a platform that celebrates the catastrophe rather than rejecting it.
 
And if these beliefs make me a special snowflake, then fine.  I'm a special snowflake.  A special, disappointed, but hopeful snowflake who's got some hope and faith and fight left in me, along with the millions of other snowflakes who feel as I do.
 
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.