Throughout this week, mythical wife and I have introduced a baby monitor, so that we can put her down at a scheduled time, and still be able to keep eyes and ears on her from elsewhere in the house, while we try to reclaim a little bit of time for ourselves. At first, it felt almost alien, having some free time back, and initially I used them only to do chores and tasks that tend to fall to the backburner on most days, but then when I’d finish those, I realized that it wasn’t yet 11 pm, and I actually had some free time back on my hands. It was kind of nice.
Today, my daughter let out the most high-pitched shrieks I’ve ever heard come from her. Worse off, we heard them first through the baby monitor, so they occurred with neither parent in sight. I tore up the stairs and into the bedroom to get to my child as fast as possible, and hearing them in person was the most soul-piercing sounds I’d heard in my entire life. I picked her up out of the bassinet and held her to my chest immediately. Moments later I was in the most tears I’d been in since her birth, because no parent should want to hear such horrific sounds emanating from their baby.
Fortunately, everything seemed to be fine; maybe she was having a bad dream, or maybe it was the fear of awakening without the use of her arms, since we have her sleep swaddled. Maybe a combination of both, or maybe she was overheated, since the bedroom tends to warm up throughout the day. But either way, because nobody can speak baby, we’ll never truly know to why she was in such a frenzied panic, but all I do know is that it was one of the most frightening experiences for me in recent memory, and I’m still admittedly a little shaken up by it, regardless of if everything is fine.
So earlier in the day, I had seen amongst the throngs of social justice awareness amidst current events, a gallery of tropes associated with commonly heard phrases or lack thereof. Among them was one that accurately fits where I stand in regards to current events: staying silent.
Apparently, my choice to stay silent on social media is perceived as racist, because I am not actively speaking out against it therefore I am propagating the spread of it instead. Not because I, I don’t know, have an immunocompromised infant child that takes precedence over literally fucking everything on the face of the planet instead?
Don’t get me wrong, I like the person who shared the post with all these quotes. I genuinely feel they’re good people, and I don’t hold it against them for exercising their own voice in this definite chaotic present time, because everyone raising their voices might be the only thing to possibly make some change around this shitty fucking country right now. Just as I feel no eyerolls or abject criticism for all other people who are exercising their own voices and posting and speaking out and going out and protesting.
But the notion that those who aren’t changing their profiles to black squares or posting on every outlet their support for black lives or denouncing racism, is actively supporting hatred as a result?
Shut the fuck up and get the fuck out of my life.
You don’t know what’s going on in my life, or the lives of others who might be remaining silent.
I believe that black lives do matter. In fact, I believe a lot of lives do matter, but make no mistake, the black ones have had a raw deal historically, and they most certainly don’t deserve to be so unjustly targeted and unprotected by the laws of our country and the people who are supposed to uphold them, so in light of current events, they definitely need the support, and I do support the movement, in spite of my history of being critical of racial double standards and hypocrisy.
But as I’ve stated before, even if it makes me a hate-spreading racist for staying silent, I have to make my world a little bit small and insulated, because there’s just one specific life that matters to me more than all others: my baby’s. Everything else, as important as it genuinely is in the grand spectrum of this country’s longevity, is still background noise, because compared to the safety and care of my very young child, everything else is pretty secondary.
All the bad cops out there busting heads, all the looters wrecking businesses of innocents, all the politicians not even trying to hide their racial prejudices anymore, all of that is really, genuinely bad shit. But the details of the first three paragraphs of this post, that puts me in a way worse place than all of that other shit permeating throughout the rest of the country.
If things were different and I didn’t have a wife and didn’t have a child, I’d probably go out and protest, and go out and march, regardless of the pandemic that is still actively going on. I’d wear ski goggles and a respirator and do my best to quell my nerves and march with people in hopes of raising awareness for the changes that desperately need to occur in this country.
But they’re not. I have a wife, and I have a child, and the things I do and the choices I make aren’t just entirely about me anymore. And I would really appreciate it if the masses of social justice keyboard warriors on their e-pedestals all over the internet could get off the nuts of me, as well as other people who aren’t blabbing all the time on the internet about their activism, and stop accusing us of being enemies because we’re not like them, that would be fucking peachy.
