I ran across this video when I looked at my Facebook “Memories” for today:
The original episode of Kramer this is from aired in December 1995. That is, almost thirty years ago.
VOLUNTEER: You’re checked in. Here’s your AIDS ribbon.
KRAMER: Ah, no thanks.
VOLUNTEER: You don’t want to wear an AIDS ribbon?
KRAMER: No, no.
VOLUNTEER: But you have to wear an AIDS ribbon.
KRAMER: I have to?
VOLUNTEER: Yes.
KRAMER: Yeah, see, that’s why I don’t want to.
VOLUNTEER: But everyone wears the ribbon. You must wear the ribbon!
KRAMER: You know what you are? You’re a ribbon bully (walks away).
VOLUNTEER: Hey! Hey you! Come back here! Come back here and put this on!
Ultimately, Kramer ends up getting beat up by his fellow AIDS walkers because he won’t wear the ribbon.
In 1995, this may have seemed over-the-top silly, but it gave a very accurate assessment of the direction human nature was going when gathered in activist mobs. An eerily similar—but not fictional—scene played out August 2020 in the District of Columbia, when BLM protesters went after people dining outdoors (remember that this was in the midst of Covid) and demanded they raise a fist to indicate solidarity with the protesters.
Lauren B. Victor refused. It wasn’t that she didn’t support BLM. An urban planner who got her MBA at Columbia, she had all the Woke chops and had even marched with BLM in the past…but she did not, at that moment, feel like bowing to the coercion.
But if you thought things couldn’t get worse from there, you’d be wrong. And this is only one example of 2024-level public threats by another Leftist mob:
Of course, humans have behaved this way in self-righteous mobs for a long time. But in the past, it was usually associated with some type of religious self-righteousness. Now a new secular self-righteousness, with Wokeness as its creed, has been rising to the level of a cult.
I can’t help thinking of C.S. Lewis’s warning:
It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
How can such a cult of “moral busybodies” be resisted, especially when it denies that it is a cult?
Thoughts?
I concur with CS Lewis. You can fight back against the robber barons in many instances. The do gooders are much harder to stop. My own motto has long been that if someone tries to force something on me 'for my own good' it is time to resist fiercely and/or run for the hills!
Excellent point made this morning Celia. I recall that episode well. I love Seinfeld, love Kramer.
“those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Yep - that’s it exactly. I strongly feel that social media and cell phones have played a huge role here with increasing this sort of thinking as it has made virtue signaling so easy, so popular, so widespread. I believe a lot of people attending protests would not be doing it if it were not for their ability and desire to share their experience on social media, to broadcast their virtue