free speech: host rejecting the infection

Here’s my post mortem on the lo­cal 12 Rounds Brew­ing Com­pa­ny thing now that the beast has been bled to the point that the dude is bail­ing out.

I’m not go­ing to talk about the ver­sion of free speech that peo­ple in com­ments sec­tions al­ways get wrong be­cause what’s even the point of that?

What I want to un­der­line is that what may seem pet­ty to some (a priv­i­leged some, in fact) is ac­tu­al­ly a big­ger win than you may think. This wasn’t about smit­ing one ass­hole with a dis­agree­able world­view. At its heart this was about us­ing your com­mu­ni­ty to ex­press the val­ues in­her­ent in that community. 

No one phys­i­cal­ly shut his busi­ness. No one van­dal­ized his pub. No one blocked the en­trances. What we did in­stead was shone as much light on it as we could and said as loud­ly as we could that “that’s not us and that’s not what we do here nor is it what we believe.”

There’s good rea­son that when this all popped off his ane­mic (and tem­po­rary) sup­port from ‘free speech’ stal­warts all seemed to be com­ing from miles away. 

Click on Face­book sup­port­ers’ pro­files and you saw a whole lot­ta Galt, Or­angevale, Lodi. 

I’m not go­ing to say any­thing against those places but it is telling that his most ar­dent sup­port­ers weren’t com­ing from the com­mu­ni­ty that sur­round­ed his neigh­bor­hood busi­ness. This was like a host re­ject­ing the infection. 

It re­mains to be seen how sin­cere this ‘di­vesti­ture’ is or if it’s just a way to lay low and col­lect checks un­der cov­er of an imag­i­nary reset. 

How­ev­er, it’s im­por­tant to re­mem­ber both how and why we wield­ed the pow­er of Com­mu­ni­ty here. It wasn’t about polic­ing one man’s stunt­ed be­liefs. It was about defin­ing what our com­mu­ni­ty is and that we will de­fend it and its vi­brant di­ver­si­ty even when po­lit­i­cal winds change course.
 
 

—ja­son malmberg

Flom­mist Ja­son Malm­berg is a sim­ple man who be­lieves in brown liquor and small dogs. He also makes art some­times. Copy­right © 2017 Ja­son Malmberg.

MOR D’ARTÍCULOS  MOR FLOMM !

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