According to Me: Do not go gentle…

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Dylan Thomas encouraged man to fight the inevitable onset of death in his iconic poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” And while the words of Thomas were not penned with current circumstances in mind, his emphatic urging could well serve as the proper mantra for the dire straits we now face.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

There is a new postmodern monopoly on the marketplace of ideas. And it is a monopoly that won’t even so much as let us define things as obvious as height and gender. Any and all detractors will be labeled and appropriately ostracized. Gone are opportunities for intelligent, insightful discussions by which we can come to understand one another. Social coercion is the order of the day.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

The embers have been glowing for some time now, but the flames began to dance when states such as North Carolina began passing legislation that it claimed to be in protection of religious freedom. Others, however, called it hate. Big box retailer Target watched the flames climb high into the night when it announced that all of its bathrooms in all of its stores had officially become “transgender” bathrooms. “To dissent is to hate,” the clanging cymbals of popular media echoed in the wake.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And the tiniest spark matured into engulfing inferno this week when Barack Obama did all but decree that public schools should open their bathrooms to allow students to whichever bathroom suits their gender identity, a quaint little buzz phrase generated to succinctly say that everything you thought you knew is actually up for debate. Attached to the presidential overstepping was an “unvague” and unveiled warning that failure to comply will draw the ire of the king. That is, resistance could result in the loss of federal funding. In other words, the government pays for the education of your children and, as such, the government gets to decide what is best for them from the Common Core curriculum in their classrooms to what they are allowed to eat in the lunchrooms to which bathroom they are allowed to use. There is now officially no room of the schoolhouse that the government does not control.

Rage, rage…

Thomas wrote about death. And what death could be more devastating than that of our values or our freedom to even have ideals. Of late, any notion that is contrary to the popular line in favor of all things “transgender” is immediately labeled as hate speech and is discarded as being from a bigot. Do you understand that? The world doesn’t care that you believe there is an absolute truth that states these things are wrong. You’re a bigot. You believe in a sovereign God and that all people have the opportunity for salvation should they meet His standard? You’re a hateful bigot.

Do not go gentle…

The irony of all of this is that the vast majority of people who so readily recite the company line on this issue have probably never actually met a transgendered individual. Not someone who is an actual transgendered individual. They may know someone who is having some identity dilemmas, but that is likely the end of it. I actually worked with a transgendered individual. The person was a frequent client at the psychiatric hospital where I worked briefly. Born a male, “B” left the country and had the surgery. And although “B” identified as a female, state law dictated “B” go into the system as and be treated like a male in terms of the facilities provided. This is a conversation that has been taking place long before popular media go ahold of it. And no matter what anybody thought about “B’s” transgenderism or mental illness or anything else, “B” was a wonderfully nice and likeable person who was a contributing member to society. Absolutely none of this is about hate or discrimination or devaluing someone’s humanity. It’s about common sense.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

We have abandoned our common sense. We flock to notions without even considering alternative possibilities. If enough people call it hate, then hate it must be. If enough people call it discrimination, then discrimination it must be. In the quest for individuality and self-identity, so many have managed to think just like everybody else. Decisions even at a governmental level are now no longer the product of reason and the idea of the common good. Rather, they are based on feelings and ever-changing sensibilities. Now we have reached a point where the feelings of the few have outweighed the needs and the rights of the many. And to call for sense and reason suddenly forks no lightning.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

We should be angry. We should be angry that we are being told how we should think about something in a country built on the freedom make up our own minds. We should be furious that we are being told there are just certain things we cannot say in a country where freedom to say what we choose was a fundamental principle. We should rage at the notion that the government endeavors to tell us how our children should be reared and what indoctrination they should receive.

Rage, RAGE against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas wasn’t thinking about the death of idealism or values or any of those things. He was urging someone, likely a loved one and probably his father, to fight against the impending darkness of death. But perhaps no words are more appropriate to describe what we must do for the sake of our children and their children and so on.

Do not go gentle…

Jeremy D. Smith is managing partner of The West Alabama Watchman. He has covered news and sports in Demopolis since 2008. His column, According to Me, appears occasionally on WestAlabamaWatchman.com. It will likely appear more frequently if he ever finishes graduate school.