Welcome to the far left…
The trip to Gainsville went well. I ended up getting there about fifteen minutes after Westboro had set up, so the picketing was in full swing. They had a group of sign-wielding people circling around them, along with five or six cops standing guard (poor cops). I joined the group on the other side of the street, who were mostly hooting to the passing cars rather than heckling the hatemongers directly. I would have liked to have been close enough to hear what the crazies were shouting, when they did shout, but…eh. I’m not a confrontational person by nature, so I’ll leave it to other to heckle and get glowered at by the police.
Turns out seeing the infamous group in person is not really so different from seeing them on television and the internet. I watched them as best I could, trying to gauge how they were dealing with the attention. Is that really all they’re after? Do they wish we’d all go away? Do they not care one way or the other? They really weren’t engaging the crowd or the passing cars at all…they just stood there with blank faces holding their signs. They looked almost…bored. And boredom is not an emotion I’d associate with the sentiments expressed on their signs. Which makes me wonder: have they become so desensitized to their own message that they really don’t care how it effects others? If they’re still trying to be attention-mongers, they weren’t doing a very good job of it. Or maybe they really are just waiting for someone to get pissed off enough to do something stupid, and give them an excuse to sue?
Of course, they could have just been willing to let the anti-protesters garner all the attention for them, keep them in the media, and thus spread their message. In which case, honestly, they’re shooting themselves in the foot. I was keeping an ear on the conversations around me, trying to get a feel for the anti-protester mood. And what I got was…fun. This was fun. Westboro has become an excuse for people to make goofy signs and dance around singing ridiculous songs. There was no outrage, no hatred…not even much offense. A bit of confusion: “Do they actually believe this crap…?” People were talking about the offensive signs like the two cats in the movie Bolt talked about Bolt: with a mixture of mild disbelief, scorn, and pity.
“So the dog really believes it’s all real?”
“I know, right?”
I personally think that such hatemongering loses most of its power when it degenerates into a sad excuse for a joke. And the idea for collecting money for the organizations Westboro denounces, and then sending letters to the church thanking them for their inspiration, is spreading. Now, I don’t know if this will eventually persuade the crazies to give up…because they are, you know, crazy…but I do think it’s good for the community, and for the people they target.
Some of my favorite signs:
“Hell sounds like fun…everyone is going!”
“I have to poop”
“No waffles”
“God prefers paper over plastic”
“God hates figs”
“Fred Phelps is my baby daddy” (which is like, ew, but that was probably the point)
“And you think I look ridiculous” (this carried by a guy dressed like an American flag)
“This is a sign”
When I got there, the crowd was singing “Old McDonald had a farm”. A little while later they started “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”, but I think they only got through about five beers before it petered out. Then they sang “Who Let the Dawgs Out?”
At about 1:40PM Westboro retreated, and I went on to the downtown rally. It was mostly just booths set up for various organizations, with some music playing. I sat down for a while and just watched the people there, which was when the phrase “welcome to the far left” popped into my head. Everyone knows the stereotypes, yes? The Far Right, typically composed of angry religious and conservative fanatics, and the Far Left, typically composed of the flagrantly gay, and the neo- and ex-hippie crowd? I’m not a fan of either extreme, personally…especially since I think a lot of what each group does is done just to annoy the other group, or garner media attention. But I decided, while siting there and watching a group of costumed people dance, that if I had to pick a side, it would be the Far Left. Then I tried to figure out exactly why I liked this group better.
Because I’m not going to pretend that I really fit into the far left. But there is a sense of community, of love, of acceptance (no matter how quirky you are) among such people, that I just never feel around uber-conservatives. (And when I say conservatives or right-wingers, I’m specifically talking about the ones who gather in rallies to yell about the moral degeneration of Christian America and how Obama is a socialist and is going to destroy everything. I am not talking about the sane, everyday people who happen to hold conservative beliefs.) Right-wingers love one another. Left-wingers love everyone. There is an honesty to their antics that’s refreshingly…human? I don’t know…it’s hard to explain. The absence of anger and umbrage was nice. They’re…un-threatening and un-threatened, in a way that’s so much nicer than the Right’s propensity to use God’s wrath as a tool to make people grovel.
Plus, some of those people are so interesting.
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