{"id":46957,"date":"2020-06-04T23:14:29","date_gmt":"2020-06-05T03:14:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=46957"},"modified":"2020-08-13T23:14:38","modified_gmt":"2020-08-14T03:14:38","slug":"silence-%e2%89%a0-ambivalence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=46957","title":{"rendered":"Silence \u2260 ambivalence"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve 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.\u00a0 Tons of people suddenly loathe law enforcement, and there\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout it all, I\u2019ve 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\u2019s honestly a little bit frightening.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen no less than three posts where people are rallying others to suppress their own posting unless it\u2019s relevant to current events, because \u201cit will take up space\u201d as if there\u2019s ever been any amount of finite space on the internet.<\/span><\/p>\n

Offline, people are going out en masse to attend protests and this scares me more than anything, because unless you\u2019ve 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.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve mostly kept quiet about all of this because I frankly don\u2019t know what to really say.\u00a0 My world right now is quite tiny, because yes I definitely have feelings for what\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

But please don\u2019t mistake my silence for ambivalence, and I do state such in response to the asinine opinion that those who aren\u2019t 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.\u00a0 That\u2019s a bullshit belief, and I really scoff at anyone who believes such; but only those specific people.<\/span><\/p>\n

Because saying \u201ceveryone\u201d would be an blanket statement, and frankly I feel that we\u2019re in this what I\u2019m calling blanket statement culture<\/strong>, 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Regardless, many are doing it, and I can\u2019t 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\u2019m sure another devastating wave of coronavirus reports are on the near horizon but that\u2019s a different story for another time.<\/span><\/p>\n

The bottom line is that I very much care about what\u2019s going on in the world right now. I do believe black lives matter.\u00a0 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\u2019t the case otherwise.\u00a0 The only real blanket statement that I\u2019ll deliberately put out is that there are lots of bad people in general out there, regardless of if they\u2019re a cop, a black person or a guilt-ridden white person, among other classes.<\/span><\/p>\n

And just because I\u2019m not participating in social media activism, or out there protesting does not mean that I do not care.\u00a0 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\u2019re above the law.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Just don\u2019t lump me in with those who don\u2019t care, just because my world has a slightly more important thing in it than civil unrest.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve 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.\u00a0 Tons of people suddenly loathe law enforcement, and there\u2019s no end to the ping-ponging of stories out there where one side of the fence is writing whatever they can … Continue reading Silence \u2260 ambivalence<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[176,112,89,156,49],"class_list":["post-46957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-murica","tag-crime","tag-racism","tag-social-media","tag-wtf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46957"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46958,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46957\/revisions\/46958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}