I remember after Trayvon Martin was shot a dozen years back. And hearing about a white mama who said, "His mama can't have loved him the way I love my kids. Black women just aren't capable of that kind of depth." And that was the first time that the idea that some people truly believe "all humans are equal, but some are more equal than others" smacked me in the face. I've seen it since in the dialogue around migrants and refugees, indigneous parents whose kids were taken from them, around asylum seekers, in the dialogue around religious vs non-religious people, and quite notably in many Americans' views of non-Americans.
"They're not like us; they don't pain or hurt or grief the way we do. They're less than | not really | incapable of being human."
Sometimes I think about everything that I am and have and known and own.
Sometimes I think about the fact that I am an unmarried, childless woman, owning property, earning her own wage, respected in her communities, broad in her education, expansive in her reach and influence.
I don't think people always realise just how precarious my existence as me is. Unmarried and childless puts me on the female discard heap of all societies back six thousand years of human community save western ones of the last thirty years. Owning property in my own name wasn't possible for a middle-upper class woman like me until forty years ago in the west, and was only occasionally allowed of upper-class/noblewomen in the thousands of years before. Earning a wage several times the human median - at least twice the male median wage in my society? Extremely rare (guildmistresses, maybe), if not unheard of.
I'm of Asian descent - visibly, undisguisably so - in a western/caucasian society. A citizen of that society, with all the legal rights that a white male of equivalent age born into the same society has.
When people talk about their rights and freedoms being taken away, I always reflect on the rights and freedoms I have, and which women like me have not had for generations upon generations upon generations. I think about me existing a hundred years ago - neither a citizen of China nor one of Australia, someone's household dowd, or a slanty-eyed slut, with no property and no rights and no chance to better myself and my life through any path that anyone will let me take. In that world, I am lesser, and every person I interact with sees me as lesser and treats me as lesser and that's just the way it is/the way God ordained it.
Rights? Freedoms? My existence as a respected and respectable person surfs on a wave that is barely as old as I am, compared with the solid ground of thousands of years of western manhood and masculine dominance. It may yet take me and others like me to a sandy beach from which we can reach solid ground; it may yet dump us in the surf and leave us gasping.
So, to be honest, I find it hard to sympathise with the 'my rights, my freedoms' crowd. I understand what they're feeling - panic and fear at the loss of the certainties that they thought they'd have: time to prepare for the end of the world, time to live in sumptuous excess without thought for tomorrow, time to slowly let go of their beliefs that technology can save us or the arc of human history bends towards justice. It's just a lesser concern in my lights.
Choices and consequences.
There are countries where people have lived as the powerless minority for so long, where victimhood is the norm and self-empowerment is a pipe dream. There are countries where people can't talk about their beliefs or their interests or they'll get locked away and 'reconditioned' - as though humanity is something that others can fix. There are women still alive who were sterilised to keep them from having "the wrong kind of children", and at this moment there is a child-bride weeping in the bed of her husband who is literally old enough to be her father.
These people don't get a choice. They only get consequences.
We get the choice and in that choice we get to bear the consequences. A government can mandate vaccination, and you can still choose not to be vaccinated and take the consequences of not vaccinating. One can argue that the unvaccinated shouldn't have to bear consequences for their choice, but then who bears the consequences when the unvaccinated get sick and take up time and space in the society that could go to someone who didn't get as sick from something that was eminently preventable?
A government can say 'you can't gather and protest' and people can choose to ignore that dictate and gather anyway - and face the consequences of being arrested and getting sick and losing their job for their participation. But the price is also paid by people who weren't at the anti-masking protests: the health professionals who have to deal with those who got sick, the family members who subsequently got sick, the co-workers who had to pick up the slack when their colleagues were let go.
Does this mean we just sit down and shut up and be good little automaton droids in the capitalist system? Don't be so extremist. It's not a one or the other. But there are times and places and spaces to rebel against the system, and there are times and places and spaces to let the system do best what it can do: deal with the processing of large volumes of humans in matters that affect state and national outcomes.
Sometimes I sympathise quite fiercely with the anthropomorphic personifications of Death from Terry Pratchett's Discworld: THERE IS NO JUSTICE; THERE'S JUST US.
