The previous post did a thing that blog entries often do — center the speaker or writer, then focus outward. I’m aware that the goal when talking or writing about Black Lives Matter and doing real advocacy is to center the voices of people not ordinarily heard.
So look and listen and learn, and we will keep working at it all. And I will still probably be here periodically being exasperated. But even that word includes the possibility of hope.
I have little patience with word-processors at the moment, having used at least four different ones in the past three weeks. WordPress offers me “blocks” and I think perhaps kettling my text is not the sort of thing I want to do right now.
Barriers, blocks, hierarchies, conveniences, order, The Way Things Have Been… I am well tired of the lot, and I am not nearly as inconvenienced as the unnecessarily dead or the unjustly killed.
Lives of people lost to illness because those with power wanted nothing to be bigger than their own egos, certainly not a virus. Lives of black and brown peoples, of native peoples, of peoples ripped from their homes by profiteers, or chased from their homes by remarkably similar power grabs and hubris. Dozens of expediencies calcify into malice and people cannot breathe. Grenfell Tower burns. Covid-19 spreads. Traffic stops, sleeping in ones own bed, asking to be left alone, all turn deadly. The structures and choices that made these atrocities possible also made possible incredible comfort for others, and to think the things built that way will stand is, well,
Rotten, like the bottom of a wooden garden bed made from the wrong substance from the very beginning. There is no ‘fix’, there is just starting over, hopefully smarter. Hopefully in better concert with the local realities. Maybe just plain hopefully, which itself is a bit of an ask these days…
Lots of behaviors are creaking, cracking open under the weight of contradictions. And many more people seem able to see these things too, maybe because the revolution is going to be televised, or cell phone video’d or something that hasn’t hatched yet…?
I read a short essay recently by someone who said that he and his friends with guns were not going to intervene on behalf of people who say “Hey, look, you said you needed the weapons for when govt. became oppressive, and don’t you see some oppression going on here that is far more deadly than the horror of missed haircuts?”….because, in a nutshell, people had ‘mocked’ gun rights folks in the past for carrying. And my immediate thought was — You are telling me you can be deterred from your proclaimed mission so easily? You’re willing to tolerate the deaths of children and innocent bystanders over and over and OVER….but mockery is what will keep you home?
Really?
“I’m not going to confront oppression because that one time someone was laughing at me”
?!??!!
Let’s set aside that most people who want stricter gun laws are not laughing at the people who are sports hunters or target shooters. We’re not laughing at the mass shooters. We have asked, on many occasions, if there’s some other reason heavy weaponry should be in the hands of civilians, and we’ve been given official answers. But what we’ve seen is that the loudest of the gun rights arguments == We need these to protect the people from government’s lopsided power == evaporated somewhere between displays of selfishness during a pandemic and not showing up when peaceful protesters are getting bloodied in the streets. And THAT, that contradiction, is worthy of mockery.
May mighty forests arise from these ashes; may we tend them and defend them as they grow.
Rethorykal Questions 