Complicity

You have access to a time machine. You are asked the standard question, ” if you could go to ant time in history, when would you choose?”

I wonder if, at any time in the future, you would pick 2020, because so far, it’s not shaping up as the greatest year, certainly since I can remember. Mind you, that fluctuates a bit these days!

There have, I will admit, been moments of real peace, contentment, and pleasure. I have been blessed with a daily choir of birdsong, the gradual change of nature, the joy of seeing new life along the river, the sweet pungency of wild garlic, and the endless love of a dog for his ball!

But being apart from loved ones by decree has been hard, and no amount of Zoom time makes that easier. And the emotional flights and dives, the concern for those dearest, the uncertainty of tomorrow, the anger at the callous incompetence, has coloured every moment.

And as the pandemic moves towards the next stage, whatever that may be, the anger becomes more of a constant.

There are other countries in the world who have been cursed with leaders of a deeply narcissistic and callous hue, and some of them have already begun to realise the implications, and the others will follow.

But the two that, at the moment, terrify me most are our own and the US.

The approaches have been different only in tone, although at times a lot closer than may have previously been expected. We have moved from bumptious and gung-ho to slightly more measured, and back to deeply callous within 3 months. The US never changed. It was high grade lunacy from the start, and still is.

And now the shit storm that those in power have created has pulled racism into the pot with Covid 19; although statistically it has always been there.

The fact that the majority of people in the UK have shown sense, and compassion, and humanity throughout the pandemic says much about who we can be as people, individually and collectively.

However, that doesn’t remove the responsibility from anyone who was happy to place a buffoon in charge, with a sociopath pulling the strings. And that includes fellow party members, and every single voter who put a cross against his name.

It was clear and obvious from the very start, lets be fair, for years before the start, that at the very least he was a callous and entitled opportunist, with no honour, no humanity, and not a care regarding the ripples of implication that would follow from his actions.

And before anyone cites the furlough scheme, and any other ‘supportive’ measure that has been activated, let us consider who will benefit from cheap government money. Strangely enough the exact same people who have always benefited from Tory ‘generosity’, the haves, not the have nots.

And the explicit river of racism that runs through all that has happened cannot be hidden, although of course it will always be denied. hose hardest hit, those suffering the most, are those who were accused of causing many of austerity’s wounds, the immigrants who have saved this country from a worse fate.

But hey, why bother with the truth when a good smear campaign gets you a vote or two. And being shamed into reversing a denial of free healthcare for those who are serving at the coalface of this crisis, is just a small indicator of the calibre of person we have leading us.

But across the ocean we witness the true vulgar horror of overt racism, and the complicity in that scenario is clear. And the knife edge that the US sits on art this moment is creating such deep chasms in that society that it is hard to see how it will ever heal.

We all have a very simple choice, and it has to be made now.

We must decide whether we allow the total avoidance of the hard questions, of the ‘why did it fail?’, ‘why did so many die?’, ‘why were so many from non-white ethnic backgrounds?’.

Or whether we demand, and keep demanding, that these facts are addressed, these questions are answered, these ‘leaders’ are held to account.

And that also means that each of us looks at ourselves, and what we allow to happen in front of us, what we allow to slide by, what we claim ignorance of.

Compliance is complicity, acceptance is complicity, and I, we, need to be aware. And we need to say no to a return to the status quo.

Because a return to normal is not acceptable, there is now only one normal that acceptable, the one where Black Lives Matter.