Affluent White Female Liberals Are Living In A Made-Up World
Carrie Gress
The Land of Make Believe will eventually come to an end, and sobriety and rationality will be restored. Let’s pray the correction doesn’t come in the form of a hot war or a natural disaster.
In a recent viral video, an angry mob (composed almost entirely of white women) hurled expletives at the staff of a Minneapolis CorePower yoga studio, berating them because they reportedly removed anti-ICE signage. While their verbal onslaught apparently worked in this case, these females revealed just how many women live in a Land of Make Believe where everyone magically bends to their will.
This tiny glimpse into the world of make-believe perpetuated by Affluent, White, Female, Liberals (AWFL) has been a long time in coming; many are waking up to the saccharine dream where the AWFLs can do whatever they want, unscathed, while the rest of us must conform and then clean up their messes. For decades the West has built itself around the ideal life for these women, requiring very little by way of sacrifice, inconvenience, earnest effort, or real scrutiny. In today’s world, it is good to be a victim. It is a made-up world that most of us have grown used to believing is real.
To understand the origins of the Land of Make Believe, we have to go back to before Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood. Most of human history hasn’t had entire generations come and go without experiencing a hot war, aggressive overthrow, famine, economic downturn, or some other significant life-threatening event. Such realities, we are told, stymie culture instead of building it. Curiously, however, for all our contemporary comfort and plenty, cultural growth has not been what one might expect.
While living in Italy for two years, there was always a question at the back of my mind as I walked through the heart of Rome each day for morning Mass followed by morning cappuccino: Why is all this so beautiful while the same walk in most any American city would leave one cold and uninspired? I marveled at the sheer saturation of it all, marked clearly, but with a lack of uniformity — the Pantheon’s hole in the ceiling; Piazza Navona’s breadth and fountains; the regal Romanesque of Santa Maria in Trastevere; and the living marble of Apollo and Daphne at the Borghese Gallery. None of these, however, was the fruit of a people who had enough leisure and comfort to sit on their laurels and simply create in wealth and luxury.