Past Lives Matter - Or, Let The Living Breathe Freely, Yet Safely · 7:30pm Jun 10th, 2020
I feel like I should have more to say. Were my schedule in the past week down to me alone, I would have written a lot, lot sooner. I’ve a habit of waiting a while. Largely because I like to think on things. But there’s little here that requires thinking about. Or there shouldn’t be. What’s right and wrong, for once, should be clear.
To choke a man to death, ignoring their pleas, is murder. To use the power you have to commit murder is to abuse that power. Nobody abuses their power unless they expect to get away with it. And if they expect to get away, it’s because they know that enough people will always think worse of the ones they wronged. There is a word for this. Hate.
Yet hate is not the only factor. Indifference is what allows hate to thrive. It is, all in all, solely circumstance which has led this particular hate crime to explode in significance.
Because for too many people, living in the nation that calls itself the leader of the Free World, this happening or the fear of it happening to them is all too real. It has been so for the past two centuries. It still is so today.
I've no personal experience to which I can refer for what I write here. I do not belong to any of the groups of people in America who live with this as their daily reality. I don’t live in America, I am not even American. I’ve heard the stories, yes, but although some would hear and choose not to listen, it’s never the same to hear as to live through.
However, over the past three months, there is one experience which we’ve all been made to live through, one way or another.
We’ve been exposed, if perhaps only a glimpse, to the fear of the ground giving way beneath out feet. The realisation that death may not merely come suddenly, but unseen. In itself, death is indifferent, as only death has the right to be. Here, we are all equal before a silent killer not driven by any act of hatred or pettiness or cruelty, nothing but nature at work.
Except that isn’t true.
It isn’t true because, in reality, there are some of us more in danger than others. This is not restricted to America. In Great Britain, people have proven to be at greater risk of infection from coronavirus based on factors of economic and social disparity - but most of all, skin colour. Not the result of any individual act, perhaps. Yet it is the result of a collective situation in which this seems normal.
Does going out onto the streets to protest, oftentimes lacking masks, let alone distancing, contribute to the threat posed by coronavirus? Yes. Sadly, it does. But in no way has this threat been worsened more than by an American administration which gives bad advice, refuses to address the virus as a federal crisis and, far before the protests, listed the highest coronavirus-related death toll in the world. A toll, incidentally, exceeding that of the Vietnam War.
The people out protesting are not safe from the virus. The majority of the people out protesting will not be safe even after the virus recedes. They know this. It is what they are protesting. Even with the world in the grip of a pandemic, a petty tragedy has played out, one which has been repeated countless times.
Wearing a health-mask is not living in fear. Protests turning into riots and looting is a bad thing, yet it is not ‘domestic terrorism’. But does the American government speak of domestic terrorism when people in Michigan oppose wearing masks with guns in hand, or escalate this to outright invading a government building?
I’m aware that on Fimfiction, we’ve heard news of the role held by one from out community in a scene that made the news at the protests. I speak, of course, of Jeftire2012. And it's news where I feel deep regret to say that I can’t be on the side of the author of It’s A Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door, though it be one of my favourite ponyfics - and one with an ironic title, now.
Evidence linked to Jetfire’s Twitter shows that him rushing at the protesters with a sword was a premeditated act. He was not defending a business he owned, but a bar he liked frequenting. To call this ‘defense’ is misleading, since the bar was under no immediate threat. The people whom he rushed were protesters, not rioters or looters. And while the beating the protesters gave in retaliation was brutal and unpleasant, it can be claimed they were acting in self-defense.
I neither wish nor intend to paint a target on Jetfire. Show him sympathy, if you will, for the injuries that he sustained. But do not praise him for an act of stupidity, let alone an act of racially-motivated hatred. The past years have shown there is an ugly undercurrent to this fandom, of which Jetfire’s actions are purely symptomatic.
Other, better-informed fans than I have written about the matter. MrNumbers, or Cynewulf, or PresentPerfect. I credit my good friend Sledge115 and his blog, too, with keeping me up to snuff on all this.
Do I plan on removing It’s A Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door from my list of favourites? No, I do not. Likely will I read it again, see it differently than I used to, and wish I could look at it the way I did before. Still, I find it unlikely I’ll ever dislike it for what it is, a story I closely associate with the fun of reading ponyfiction. To go back on that would be to deny a part of my being a fanboy.
At any rate, all of which has been written about here, really - the killing that sparked the protests, the mad sword assault on protesters, the men with guns in government buildings, or indeed my own relation to any of it - this is all but the micro.
The macro is a larger, ongoing story, systemic to our culture, but to American history in particular. Regardless of who wins the next American presidential election, racial inequality and the unjust treatment of the poor in ‘first-world’ countries will not go away overnight. Nor should we approach this by trying to remove it from memory, scrub it out of the history we’re taught.
One thing we thing we definitely should not do is allow Facebook to manipulate us as it did in 2016.
In the UK, let us take down the statues of Edward Colston or of Cecil Rhodes, and follow through on the calls to remove the monuments to Robert E. Lee in the USA. Neither slavers nor imperialist criminals deserve to be placed on pedestals.
Nevertheless, one should ever remember to act not in haste, which would be another act of wrong. I began this journal by saying that, in a rare time this is true, there is a definite right and wrong to what happened on May 25th. But to remove the statues of Robert Peel simpley because he invented the modern concept of the police would be shooting one’s self in the foot. Peel would have understood that the problem is not the police. The problem is when the police fail to behave as a police.
He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.
I keep hoping that trump loses this November. I keep hoping that this administration is a aberration in my countries history and that these protests are a sign that maybe some kind of much needed reform is coming. But man stuff just keeps on happening. These past few years have sapped my hope.
Well said, mate. I've said my part, and you know my feelings on the matter all in all.
You've mentioned Robert E. Lee here. Good. His loyalty to Virginia makes him complicit in the institution of slavery. He isn't someone to be celebrated.
Let us hope something permanent or lasting comes out of this. Better yet, work towards it.