What's Next? 32

It just all seems to get stupider and stupider.  Everything, and everyone.  It's pretty understandable.  This pandemic has us all unhinged, as if we weren't already bad enough before.  The black and white thinking that has overtaken much of activism I find particularly disturbing.  Or it could be that I am merely getting older, and because of my advancing age, have become allergic to this egregious lack of nuance or perspective, which likely has always been with us.

Someone wrote on a wall in a park just the other day, in white chalk, "all lives matter".  And a park employee backed it up.  He has since been publicly shamed as a racist. But is he, really?  The Black Lives Matter folks seem to think so.  But they appear to be ready to consign anyone who deviates from any of their tenets of political fundamentalism as a racist, so what's the point of reasoning with any of these people.  They are blinded by ideology.  Now, rest assured, Gentle Reader, anyone who is with Black Lives Matter who reads this will probably have switched off by now.  Upon reading that their sacred positioning is being questioned they're going to snort, or scream, "racist white supremacist", and discard or ignore anything that follows.

Well, for those of you with minds that are just a little more open, here is what follows.

First of all.  I don't do slogans.   They paint everything in black and white, obstructing all other colour and nuance, and that ends up being only destructive to the very aims of their otherwise laudable and admirable movement towards dismantling systemic racism.  But, yes, Black Lives do matter.  But I would be more inclined to insert, also, as in black lives also matter, or perhaps black lives ALSO matter.  Especially with all the ugly crap that has been dumped on people of African descent from the slave ships, through Jim Crow, lynchings and more recently police and state violence against people of colour.  This is all problematic, hugely problematic and of course I recognize all of this.

I also agree that the anger of racialized people is completely legitimate.  Anger can, and should be, empowering.  But on the other hand, when it morphs into rage, or even more dangerously, into wrath, that is when things get very tricky.  That is when we become blinded and simply are going to act out destructively, or even simply close our minds and eyes to any other point of view that might question or challenge our modus operandi.  This is very unfortunate, and it is also, sadly, very inevitable.

Black lives matter.  So do queer lives.  And disabled lives.  And mentally ill lives,  and indigenous lives and brown lives, Asian lives, poor lives, even if they happen to be also white lives.  Yes, let's keep challenging and working against historic, structural and systemic racism.  But let's do this with some skill and precision please, otherwise in our rage, some of the very people whose help we will be needing will simply hear and be deafened by our screaming and nothing else.

All for now, duckies.