I’ve had a difficult time putting into words the things that I feel these days, as the world continues to sink further and further into chaos. Tons of people suddenly loathe law enforcement, and there’s no end to the ping-ponging of stories out there where one side of the fence is writing whatever they can to slander the other side of the fence. Cops supposedly being overheard ordering each other to deliberately go out and hurt protesters, protesters being accused of transforming into looters, and the list goes on and on where two definitive sides are trying to smear the other.
Throughout it all, I’ve watched own social media landscape turn from a pretty casual, relaxed locals-only kind of environment to where everyone is now taking a very intense voice about current events, and it’s honestly a little bit frightening. People calling out their friends and family that might have different viewpoints, and others ready to get into vitriolic arguments at the drop of a hat if anyone dares to have a conflicting opinion. I’ve seen no less than three posts where people are rallying others to suppress their own posting unless it’s relevant to current events, because “it will take up space” as if there’s ever been any amount of finite space on the internet.
Offline, people are going out en masse to attend protests and this scares me more than anything, because unless you’ve been living under rocks, protests all across the country have often descended into riots, regardless of whom starts it, and the nights end with tallies of injured, arrested, and eventually if this keeps up, dead. Cops beating the shit out of civilians, bouts of looting erupting in just about every city where protests are occurring, and as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing good at all is happening on a nightly basis.
I’ve mostly kept quiet about all of this because I frankly don’t know what to really say. My world right now is quite tiny, because yes I definitely have feelings for what’s happening in the greater world all around me, but with an infant child that classifies as medically fragile, my focus and energy is primarily on my baby, whom I grieve for, having been born in such a terrible year in history.
But please don’t mistake my silence for ambivalence, and I do state such in response to the asinine opinion that those who aren’t posting allied messages, or changing their Facebook profile pictures to black squares, or going out and protesting, or any other virtual action or otherwise, is implicit in the negativity by being inactive. That’s a bullshit belief, and I really scoff at anyone who believes such; but only those specific people.
Because saying “everyone” would be an blanket statement, and frankly I feel that we’re in this what I’m calling blanket statement culture, where the prevalent opinions that are being flung around left and right are these gigantic, overarching blanket statements where all cops are bad, all protesters are looters, all black people are thugs, and all sorts of encompassing rhetoric.
Regardless, many are doing it, and I can’t help but feel concerned that in doing such is what spreads and influences such divisive opinions at a rate that moves as rapidly as the pandemic that is still very much in play, regardless of how many masses of people are conglomerating in spite of it, so I’m sure another devastating wave of coronavirus reports are on the near horizon but that’s a different story for another time.
The bottom line is that I very much care about what’s going on in the world right now. I do believe black lives matter. But I also am not about condemning all police, because I genuinely feel that there are ultimately more good cops than there are bad cops, because the country would have collapsed long ago if that weren’t the case otherwise. The only real blanket statement that I’ll deliberately put out is that there are lots of bad people in general out there, regardless of if they’re a cop, a black person or a guilt-ridden white person, among other classes.
And just because I’m not participating in social media activism, or out there protesting does not mean that I do not care. I do care that black people have the rawest deal in the history of the country, and I do care that there are bad cops amongst us that abuse their power and think they’re above the law. It’s just that I have a baby child and a wife that needs me more than anyone else in the world does, but if neither were in play, then things might be different, but who really knows.
Just don’t lump me in with those who don’t care, just because my world has a slightly more important thing in it than civil unrest.
