There’s a bandwagon rolling by.
Social media is good and bad in equal measure, sometimes both at the same time. Messages are sent, and campaigns fought, that are often no more than banal opportunities to virtue signal, or to state the bleeding obvious. ‘Share this if you love your daughter/hate cancer/adore the NHS/loathe trophy hunting/love otters/despise Donald Trump/want Captain Tom to be given a knighthood’ etc etc. You get my drift.
By taking a concept that is, on the face of it, easy to agree with, they defy you not to add your own support and help to create a monochrome world of quite nice people who want only reasonable things. Nearly all of them, in my experience, originate in some ulterior motivation that you need to identify first, which might be no more than getting numbers on a petition, but could also be part of a Cambridge Analytica-type delve into your life.
By and large, unless they are extremely funny, I ignore them all, as most of us do. I prefer, instead, to agonise through and then frame my own opinions, faulty though they may be, rather than repost someone else’s.
Until now.
When Officer Derek Chauvin knelt for eight and a half minutes on George Floyd’s neck in Minneapolis on May 25th, most human beings would very swiftly arrive at the conclusion that, on the face of it, an illegal killing had taken place in full daylight, and in front of three colleagues who appear to have done little or nothing to stop it. They might also like to think that this was one hideous incident by one policeman out of the other 686665 US cops, the vast majority of whom go about their jobs in a law abiding and helpful way, and they would possibly be right. But then, they might know some of the US’s troubled history on race relations and feel an uncomfortable sense of deja-vu, and wonder how the hell it ever gets sorted.
Then they see their first ‘Black Lives Matter’ post on social media, and they wonder what to do. It is a statement so clearly true that they almost feel that to press ‘share’ is to reduce the whole thing to its lazy lowest common denominator, and most of them, of us, move on.
Not me. Not any more.
I don’t even pretend to understand the whole complicated matter of social justice in another country, but I do know that, despite all the progress since 1960’s, despite electing for two terms a black president, the life of the average black person is miserably worse, more challenging and shorter (6 years shorter, in fact) than the life of the average white person. That matters, and let’s not pretend it doesn’t. And we know from lots of things, most recently the Covid death rate, that it matters just as much here in our own country, too.
It’s breakfast time of a new day, so, for the sake of decency, let’s try to leave President Trump out of things, other than to spit the sick out of our mouths at the picture of him waving a bible outside St. John’s Church in Lafayette Park, and to credit him for getting me off my complacent backside on this one.
For it is Trump who has finally taught me that I need to add my weak, privileged, comfortable, white voice to the others, because I simply don’t know what else I can do. I couldn’t give a toss if it comes over as virtue signalling, or bandwagon boarding: for the first time in my life, I have just been awake half the night because I am furious at the whole bloody unfairness of it all.
‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice,’ said the irrepressible Desmond Tutu, ‘you have chosen the side of oppression.’
There are times, as my son Tom pointed out at lunch yesterday, when it is laughably easy to know which side of history to be on.
Black lives matter.
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