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Saturday morning

tielan: (Default)
Saturday, June 6th, 2020 08:49 am
This morning I posted on FB and Twitter about writing letters to Members of Parliament, specifically the NSW Police and Corrections minister regarding black deaths in custody in Australia and the Royal Commission of 1991, whose recommendations were never instigated.

I took it from Common Grace's form letter about indigenous deaths in custody because it has all the names, emails, mailing addresses, and phone numbers, along with the state and the title that the ministers in question hold.

About 15 minutes after posting, I got a driveby 'white lives matter' comment on FB. I promptly hid the comment, mostly because I didn't want my friends to engage with it.

I'm not a high profile person, my audience is pretty much the people I know from online (mostly left-leaning) and the people I know in RL (probably consider themselves left-leaning but rather more centrist). I'm mostly looking to reach the people I know in RL, but they're not the kind to post about social justice, really. Partly they don't have the time or energy, and partly they're not going to broadcast their thougts on the internet, while after 20 years on LJ and DW, I'm accustomed to emoting on the internet.

I figure that the driveby comment was literally a 'drive by' by someone who did a search for posts about 'black lives matter' and then went around being an asshole. (Assholes on the intarwebs; who'da thunk it?) There was no context, no argument, no common connection, so I just ignored it.

The NSW Supreme Court declared that the BLM march contravened COVID-19 restrictions; and yes, I had concerns about that, even if I'm not in the risk area.

Also, a march is all very well to give an indication of numbers, but I feel like this current crop of politicians only respond to threats at the ballot box...and too many of the MPs in our area are rusted on and barely have to turn up.

So I've been pushing letter writing, phone calling, and contact. It's not very public. It's not cool. You don't really get to boast about it. But if I could get 20 people from my gardening group and another 10 from my local climate change organisation to send the Federal MP for our electorate the same message...

That's Saturday morning so far. And it's just gone 9am.

WHEW.
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rant of the day: better does not require perfect

tielan: (Default)
Tuesday, November 19th, 2019 12:56 pm
I'm so fucking tired of the argument that those of us fighting for a better world - climate change, economic reform, social reform - have to give up everything that we already have or we're hypocrites.

We do not need to detach ourselves from the world as it exists in order to fix it.

Every person in the history of humanity whom we admire for doing something great did it from a position within the broken system they were trying to make better. The abolitionists worked in the midst of a society that had been built on slavery. The suffragettes protested from a position of privilege as women of wealth and property. Even today, unionists use the jobs they already have as leverage when trying to enshrine fair rights for the worker.

You know who told them that the system worked okay and didn't need changing because things just were the way they were? That they should give up everything they had or they weren't really in the fight?

The laggards, the luddites, the naysayers, the people who we look upon now as small-hearted, mean-spirited negging nellies who've always tried to hold back what was for the bettering of society.

The people on the wrong side of history.

Yeah, our footprint isn't neutral. We were born into a system that grinds others beneath its wheels and there's no way of avoiding it. The meanest child born in the western world today has benefited from the taking of native lands, the sweat of slavery, the unacknowledged work and effort of the women in our society. And that's just for starters. There's no way to undo what we've benefited from - not today, not even if we had all the power in the universe.

But we need to push back against the idea that if we can't do it perfectly, then we shouldn't even bother trying to be doing better. That kind of purity mentality is toxic enough in fannish discourse; but it's flat-out poison when put upon those who are just trying to improve the world.

The people saying that those pushing for an acknowledgement of climate change need to be perfectly green first are the kind of people who say that because they can't be perfect they shouldn't even bother trying to be good.

We don't have to be perfect to do better.
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