“Big feelings are okay,” sings Ms Rachel in one of her characteristic children’s songs. “It’s okay to have big feelings. I’m here to stay with your big feelings. I’m not afraid of your big feelings.”
It’s a beautiful sentiment, one worth emphasizing to children so they can wrestle with some of the more difficult aspects of being human. A major piece of the backlash to “wokeness” in recent years has been an exhaustion with an unwillingness or inability to deal with big feelings — difficulty tolerating disagreement, demands for ideological congruence, overstatement of harm when it isn’t forthcoming. The Right calls people who are hypersensitive in this particular manner “snowflakes,” a term synonymous in conservative parlance with left-wing social justice warriors.
But as the Left struggles with how to shed the histrionic style of political engagement while staying committed to progressive social values, a new group of big-feeling-intolerant snowflakes has emerged: the Right and the pro-Israel lobby, as demonstrated by their recent attacks on Ms Rachel herself.
The popular children’s content creator, whose given name is Rachel Griffin Accurso, has become increasingly outspoken about violence against children in Palestine. Her advocacy consists entirely of observing the scale of Palestinian children’s suffering and making simple statements about its moral indefensibility. In response, conservatives are clutching their pearls over the immeasurable harm caused by her opinions. If “wokeness” pejoratively describes exaggerated grievance and swift social sanction for wrongthink, the Right’s condemnations of Ms Rachel are as woke as it gets.
Since Israel began its military campaign in retaliation for Hamas’s…
Auteur: Meagan Day
