Careful

 Any discussion of "microaggressions" has more or less fallen off the cultural agenda at this point. One of the two major parties is currently in the process of staging a fascist insurrection and dismantling our constitutional order, seemingly for the sole purpose of ensuring that no white man will ever have to attend a sensitivity training at work ever again. In the face of this unprecedented threat, liberals are choosing their battles. They are mostly just trying to clutch at whatever scraps of the rule of law still remain, and letting the right essentially have its own way on what are seen as some of the lower-stakes cultural issues. 

But it's worth reminding ourselves that the whole "microaggressions" conversation was never actually saying anything very radical in the first place. The point was just that people can blunder their way into hurting people's feelings—sometimes—not because they are being intentionally cruel or malicious—but simply because they take their own life experience to be the norm and—if they are being emotionally clumsy in the moment—they can forget about other people's life situations. All the "sensitivity trainings" were ever trying to do was to help people to be a little more cognizant of the feelings of others; to tread a bit more carefully. 

All the "microaggressions" discourse was ever really trying to get across, then, was the basic idea Philip Larkin once expressed in a poem: "we should be careful / Of each other; we should be kind / While there is still time." 

All the much-maligned and much-mocked "wokeness" movement really amounted to, similarly, in many a board room or corporate seminar, could really just be framed as basic politeness. This came to mind for me this week in watching the needless cruelty of a member of the House deliberately misgendering Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware. She responded with aplomb and managed not to be rattled by it. But I think the rest of us following along at home were rattled on her behalf. Regardless of what people believe personally about gender, surely everyone could see how ugly that moment was. 

And the ugliness wasn't because of what that other House member believed about the gender binary or anything else. It was because he just refused to be minimally polite and considerate of the feelings of others. He stood there and pointedly refused to act like a decent member of a civilized society in which we have agreed to treat one another—especially our own colleagues—with respect. 

That's all anyone was ever asking for. It's not so hard. No need to stage an insurrection and incinerate the Constitution over it. Just—be considerate. Don't be an asshole. Don't be needlessly cruel. There—that's it—you now possess the secret to passing the sensitivity trainings. Just don't be deliberately cruel or needlessly emotionally clumsy. Life is too short, and the human existence too difficult already, to spend it heaping extra pain on each other's shoulders that never needed to be there. Just be polite. To repeat Larkin's advice: "we should be careful of / Each other; we should be kind / While there is still time."