Quite the opposite.

Feeling quite patriotic it happened in this country right now.

I know what it is. I hold out no such hope. I have a horrible feeling it's just blackwashing. The backlash is going to be sizeable on both sides of the Atlantic (no reason to stop). People who a month ago were desperate to protest with machine guns in government buildings have decided that police brutality and curfews are a good idea after all - and they'll be voting in November. These are people with no real skill other than demanding the easiest personal ride possible from any and every angle necessary to sustain their worldview. Every single time the population at large in the USA and the U.K. has been given a chance to turn back recently and decently, they've doubled down instead. It'll be classed as vandalism and that'll be that for the silent majority who've never been silent in their miserable lives.

There are so many egregious things to be distressed, offended, and frightened by - coming so thick and fast on top of already existing longstanding horrors, each one alone deserving of a dedicated time consuming takedown, that the response to power is now so fragmented as to be split into so many sub-groupings that joining as a majority on overlapping interests is almost impossible.

The right of Karens in suburban Houston to have their roots done regardless of risk is the stuff that freedom and democracy and life and liberty is made of, with the WH openly supporting armed insurrection. The right to be able to breathe in the minutes leading up to your murder is quite simply an ask too far, with the WH declaring protesters as potential terrorists. I think we mistake at our peril the ability of those already in the WH and other similar locations to stay there by hook or by crook. How many times have we thought 'come on, surely now, if not when?'. Over and over and over.

I'm not scared.

You're a straight white male with no particular reason to be scared that didn't exist last month, last year, last decade so that's understandable. Many people should be scared - the opposition are not comprised of nice people willing to so much as compromise. Note - I did explicitly say that none of that precludes acting, or should be taken as a reason to stop.

I have been scared since New Years Eve 15/16. After a few women were groped in Cologne (however terrifying for those individuals) the speed with which the international far right suddenly allied themselves to feminism scared me - for how successful it was, and how quickly it filtered through more widely into public discourse. I was scared to find that French LGBT populations were found to be a major area of support for the National Front - the enemy of your enemy is not your friend, however much they pretend to be an ally of your current rights and freedoms. I was scared when Michael Gove announced within seconds of an exit poll that decency had prevailed and Jews should never again feel frightened in Britain - there are thousands of years of example of what happens when Jews are singled out and separated off as a cause celebre, including by useful idiots within Judaism's own ranks. Not one of those examples is positive.

In order for current protests to succeed, the entire underpinning of several countries will have to be ripped down, along with everything resting on it. That might happen, and it should, but that in itself would be a scary undertaking.

A few years ago I saw an impromptu talk by an Irish drag queen that took place quite organically after a performance. He said that unless you had been a noticeably camp kid in 70's/80's Ireland, you had no idea how frightening a pedestrian crossing is - because it's a place where passers by are liable/likely to scream utterly humiliating filth at you, and you just had to stand there alone, unprotected/even blamed by other pedestrians for the vulgarity their sensitive ears had just heard, while you waited the cross the road. How absolutely horrible is that? That the simple act of crossing a road can be fraught with such traumatic memories that the fear still resides at the forefront of your mind in present day London - multiple times daily. Privilege comes in many forms.

But this a place of happiness, where unrelenting joy prevails.

Are you scared to cross a road? I'm not, and I doubt you are. He is, and others are, and that's just one tiny situation. We've all created a world where an unconscionable number of people are going about the minutiae of daily life, having to give over a significant amount of brain space to the, sadly very rational, thought 'please just leave me alone, please just leave me alone, please just leave me alone'. Not being scared is an enormous privilege. Being scared doesn't equate to being a shivering wreck in the corner. Sometimes it's a rational response to a mentally ill world.

I was in a minority among my circles in believing Trump would be elected. I had a flash of blind optimism and hope after the Hollywood Access tape that he might've blown it - I endowed his basket of deplorables with too much decency, and God knows why because they've never shown any. Had a tape of Hillary Clinton surfaced, where she laughed about her compulsion to plunge an uninvited hand down the front of the jeans of every young guy that caught her eye, we'd have never heard the end of how such a depraved creature had escaped prison.

I don't kid myself that being an educated rich white straight woman in a western country is anything other than a definite silver medal on the scoreboard. It's just pretty devastating to consider how wonderful the world might already be if all those excluded throughout history and the present day had been allowed to develop their interests and contribute their talents. I don't honestly see that being rectified.

I have found the repeated and force-fed lessons in how fundamentally indecent much of the population is to be scary. Don't count your chickens - some c*** keeps smashing half the eggs.

cosmictanya wrote:

You're a straight white male with no particular reason to be scared that didn't exist last month, last year, last decade so that's understandable. Many people should be scared - the opposition are not comprised of nice people willing to so much as compromise. Note - I did explicitly say that none of that precludes acting, or should be taken as a reason to stop.

Get tae to fock.

Don't try and wind me up.

I'll rephrase it for you:

I may be scared but I'll never lat the bastards grind me down and if they come for me or any of my own I'll take a hatchet to them.

PS - stop with the politics and stop with all the 'starting a fight in an empty room' stuff'.

Seriously.

Stop being so wound up. I gave a gentle and fully reasoned reaction, that's all. The rest is all you.

It was supposed to be just pretty things that make you smile. I've said why it didn't do that for me.

Passive aggressive in excelsis.

Now that I can take as a fair cop. Your previous posting, no, not a chance.

Semantics.

Yawn.

Works with PR underlings.

Dimwits.

The sober.

Not me.

Nothing works with me.

Don't tussle in a losing battle with a born loser.

I don't know what that means.

Obviously.

I don't want to fall out with you, particularly not on my happy thread, so if you could quit accusing me of having an aggressive agenda focused against you, and a desire to start fights, telling me to get f*cked, while calling me a born loser and a dimwit and maligning my work, I'd be very grateful.

Every stick: you've the wrong end of.