The role of the shit disturbers

When I was in grad school a Canadian friend from Toronto used to refer contemptuously to political activists, left or right, as “shit disturbers.”

A brilliant young fellow, possibly a genius, he carved out a name for himself in his chosen field before finishing his master’s.

Decades later, given the spectacle of the harm done to the world by people who sought meaning for their lives through social change, I am ever more tempted to share that view.

But social changers are not always true believers driven by gratuitous ideologies, secular or religious.

Nor are they all driven by ambition, hate, or a taste for power and cruelty, as so many of the most notable revolutionary leaders, left and right, of the last century were, and so many other social changers of our own time are.

Sometimes they are the very opposite of that, true unbelievers seizing a chance to put an end to the power of others much more deserving of the titles “true believer.”

And the best example of that sort of thing is the work of the federal and Supreme Court justices who, over the long stretch of the 20^th Century reaching into the 21^st, freed us from the power of clericalism and took the power of government at all levels out of the hands of hate-driven, malevolent racism in America.

All of that was based on lies about the constitution and required extraordinary usurpation of power by black-robed revolutionaries.

But it was the best thing done by anybody the words “political activists” might even remotely be thought to refer to in all those years in our country.

Comparable progressive advances over those same years in other areas, while of great value, were by no means of such vast social significance, touching all our lives as intimately as can be imagined.

It was a huge revolution of freedom, it freed us all from an enormous weight of clericalism and the hate-driven abuse of state power that was the regime of Jim Crow and segregation.

And it was resisted at every step, and is resisted and deplored even now, by conservatives whose central claim in all their propaganda is that they stand for liberty, but whose continued aim is to put everything back where it was, just as far as they can.

Well, as regards clericalism, anyway. 

Update.

All the same, this would be an STD disaster for the whole human race.

Talk about a fine breeding ground for ever more horrific diseases.

And the liberals have from the first overstepped by forcing the anti-racist and anticlericalist agendas on private entities, including their contemporary feminist and gay militant codicils.