Some of us who have
an awareness in varying degrees about
the brutality of the pogrom happening in
this country (I say some of us, because really, there is another half of people
I know who have told me they really don't give a damn) are watching with incredulity,
horror and mostly helplessness as situations get more severe and barbaric by
the day.
Some time last year,
on a journalist's newsfeed, I read how the political party now in power,
steadily incited violence against people of a particular religion. She
described their tactic: never a full onslaught of violence but isolated
incidents, one brutal assault here, another severe bashing up there, a barbaric
rape somewhere faraway, the slow drip, drip, drip of violence random enough so
that the rest of the country by and large remained complacent enough not to
react so that inevitably now we fast forward into the full on barbarism that is
playing out today.
This drip drip drip
technique seems the norm for a prelude to violence and it is violence in itself except that its randomness can seem innocuous until we view it in retrospect which is usually too late. These acts of violence can also happen person to person, friend
to friend, always starting small: the tiny doses of unsolicited advice, the
mocking of your mannerisms, the passive aggressive rejoinders; God forbid you
react with anything other than good humour, you are told they are doing this
because they are only teasing you, because they are comfortable with you; but there
is no denying that it is violence all the same, the prelude to violence is a part of the violence, it is violence, because if it isn't stopped right there it escalates to the point
where you are spat at rather than listened to, you are told your choices are wrong, your needs are negated, you get cut off mid sentence, and before you know it you are dismantled and effectively muzzled.
Also, if there is
that one instrument which is used the way a savage would use a club, it is
the mobile phone, that device which people use to score points and dehumanize
each other. When you use the phone without regard to the other you dehumanize, you breach a basic norm
of decency and when you do so it is an act of aggression. When you fail to recognize the humanity in
another you reduce yourself to sub-human, even if only for a moment, and
your descent during that moment is intentional whatever repugnant denial ("How dare you accuse me of savagery! I did this only because I was comfortable in your presence!) you, the perpetrator of violence may come
up with.
You see it too in the small acts of everyday life, of
the person who feels perfectly justified, of the person who doesn't know he's
just committed harm, of the person who says something whose motives are clear
to everyone but her, of the person who comes up with intricate rationales or
just remains oblivious, of the person we've all been at one time or another.
Taken to an extreme, it's the mind-set of murder; enlarged in scale it's war.
Elaborate are the means to hide from yourself, the disassociations,
projections, deceptions, forgettings, justifications, and other tools to detour
around the obstruction of unbearable reality, the labyrinths in which we hide
the minotaurs who have our faces.
~ Rebecca Solnit.
The Faraway Nearby
Illustrations made
for Margaret Atwood's poem
Secrecy.
Let this flood of women's stories never cease.
