Protest as the ultimate rebellion?
An essay on disappointing your community but finding yourself
Welcome to Healing is my Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. Today’s post is a personal essay on the subject of autistic burnout and my personal history with public protests. The news from Gaza and Israel has been on my mind constantly the past two weeks (I’m not sure there is an issue quite like this one for those of us with ethical OCD—I have obsessed about it for decades now). For today, I am focused on the larger idea of protesting and showing up at this moment in history how *I* want to. As always, if you are unable to pay for a subscription but would like to read the private posts, please email me at dlmmcsweeneys@gmail.com and we will get you sorted.
In my research into evangelical authoritarian parenting books from the 1970s on (think Dr. Dobson), I found a pattern: conservative Christian men talked a lot about how rebellious and terrible the young people were. Articles in Christianity Today contained screeds against young people growing up to protest wars and demand civil rights. White conservative Christians saw the 1960s not only as a time when certain disenfranchised groups began to gain more rights, but also as a time they were losing their grip on their own children. Was there anything more embarrassing than having a white child grow up to protest the US government in the streets? No! The solution? Discipline, early and often. Instill in your children immediate respect and obedience and compliance to “god-ordained” authority. Focus on punishment and coercive control during both the toddler years and the teenage years, and if you can get the children to learn to respect authority, then they will not grow up to embarrass you. Instead, they will carry on the legacy of patriarchal white supremacist heteronormative Christianity—and the US military that supports similar aims.
I couldn’t help but giggle a bit as I read the words written by men who were scared of losing power as the world changed around them. I really am Dr. Dobson’s worst nightmare, simply by showing up to protest police brutality against Black people, or US military interventions, or racist policies like the Muslim travel bans. All of the work my parents poured into keeping me safe and “sheltered” from the liberal world, the zionist Bible curriculum, the white supremacist American history textbooks, the long talks and constant policing of what I thought, believed, and said—It was all for nothing! I ended up embarrassing my parents and my entire extended family, simply by using a sharpie marker to make my signs and standing on street corners with hundreds of other people, time and time again.
It’s funny, but it is also so terribly sad. Looking into the history of white evangelical authoritarian projects reveals how scared conservatives are of real democracy. Of the power of the people. Of more and more people gaining rights, now with access to social media where their lived reality can be seen and heard. They are terrified of dissent, of protest, of the freedom of speech for anyone besides themselves. They tried to instill this fear and shame into me and so many other people. For a time, it worked. But that is the thing about humans, isn’t it? We get to change and we get to grow. We get to look our families and our histories and our religions and our countries square in the face. And we get to decide if we want to uphold the old, old stories anymore. Or if, perhaps, we would like to protest them, out in the streets for god and everyone to see.
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On Saturday, I went to a protest march in downtown Portland. I have been glued to the news of what was happening in Gaza since I woke up at 4AM to a news alert on Saturday, October 7th.
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