The future that liberals want

This is a tweet that made the rounds in early March 2017. A far-Right Twitter user thought they would mock liberals with a photo showcasing a slice of urban diversity.

This is the future that liberals want. pic.twitter.com/QwterpqQbH

— /pol/ News Network (@polNewsNetwork1) March 1, 2017

The tweet has since been deleted, but here’s the image that was attached:

An observant individual might point out the reality reflected in that photo is, in fact, the present. Nobody tell @polNewsNetwork1; you might scare them.

Naturally, the Internet agreed that all the bigot accomplished was to expose themself as, well, a bigot. But for the hell of it, let’s examine the accusation (if it can be called that). /pol/ News Network here, as with so many hardline conservatives, thinks that liberals want … what? To ride on the subway? To wear whatever they please want without concern for some ideologue’s narrow and arbitrary sense of acceptable fashion? To enjoy the freedom of going out into the world and being themselves, exercising their right to self-expression, without bothering anyone else or hindering their rights?

Yes, actually, that is what liberals want. It’s what anyone wants if they do more than pay lip service to the ideal of freedom. Which really calls into question why this conservative, like so many of their kin, thinks this photo represents something wrong or shameful.

(An observant individual might additionally note that for a group of people that takes pleasure in deriding others for being “sensitive snowflakes”, they sure do offend easy.)

The problem isn’t the photo. The problem is the reactionary wanker trying to use it to score a cheap political point by attacking people they don’t know and who, as far as the evidence suggests, are guilty of no crime other than existing outside of said wanker’s limited worldview.

I fear the kind of future the far-Right wants. To go by what they say, it would be one where individuality is to be repressed, where being different merits scorn and where self-expression beyond the rigidly defined scope of normality is to be punished. So I’m heartened that the forces of tolerance and diversity have been steadily winning that culture war for decades, and that the rate of progress is only accelerating.

Finally, to the (presumably White, straight, cisgender, Christian, male) person behind this bigot-signalling tweet, consider this: The niqab-clad devout Muslim woman in this photo, who apparently takes no issue sharing her immediate surroundings with a proud drag queen, has more space in her Islamic mind and heart for her fellow human beings than you do. So who exactly has the problem here?

CORRECTION (06/17/17 @ 11:58 PM ET): Three and a half months later and I finally notice I’d written 2016 rather than 2017 in the lede. Oy.