A message to everyone. · 5:33am Jun 2nd, 2020
Hey, I hope everyone out there is staying safe in these uncertain times. Remember that there is no Hispanic or black or Asian race, only the human race. We are all one species, all entitled to decency, kindness, and respect. Every life matters.
It has been painful lately to see so much discord in the news, but remember we are not in this alone and our voices can not be silenced. To illustrate the importance of this, I share this powerful excerpt from They Thought They Were Free, The Germans
Be the change you want to see in the world, and be strong.
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
-Milton Mayer
They Thought They Were Free, The Germans 1933-45
Wow. For a website dedicated to magical talking unicorns and horse-birds thats incredibly deep...
If only police here saw it that way.
It's all about narrative and pushing agendas man. BLM wants civil justice against racism but the title of it only points at blacks. What about hispanic/latin or asian lives mattering? How about white lives? Native American? Indian? It is just a group trying to put emphasis on a particular topic to try and drive a change they want.
Honestly, I wont judge em' for it. Everyone does it. Even saying all lives matter in response to BLM is just pushing down that narrative and trying to hide it among the rest. Problem is, neither side is wrong. If you don't get your ideas to stand out in the crowd, they get overlooked, especially in society. People don't like to change their world-views and actively resist it. At the same time, having your agenda looked at over all the others is unbalanced. I wont say unfair because that is the natural state of the world with or without humanity.
Now, police brutality, that is illegal but people are getting away with it. Obviously a change is needed here but murdering innocent people just because of their ethnicity or because they are cops is no different from those cops murdering people out of prejudice or a misguided sense of jurisdiction.
This is all happening because the justice system has not kept up with the changes in society. Most rulings are based on previous rulings, of which can reach back to the time when slavery was legal and women and children were possessions. We may create new laws in an effort to achieve equality but those new laws have their own statutes independent from older laws. The whole system needs to be updated with race and gender not being a metric for which judgments are made. Murder is murder, rape is rape, it should not matter who/what the perpetrator or victims are.
We were ready to have a conversation about police brutality and instead we're too busy protecting what's ours from looters and others.
I'm not a misanthrope, but it's times like these that make me understand why you are. Thanks for being a bright point in the past few days.
Are You Continuing Twilights Dollhouse 2?
5347714
Very ironic that you have the same name as me. Are you hopeful about an update or are you doubtful that it is continuing? Just wondering
5349524
Im hopeful despite twilight acting OOC Its a great story
5350982
Couldn't agree more.