When ‘impartiality’ is a myth, no one wants to believe that they hold prejudices, but the fact of the matter is that we all do.
By nature of us being human, we have all been fed an ‘ideal’, with our views having been influenced by our family and friends, and by the media we consume, (a myriad of factors), which all serve to create prejudices in us against people who are ‘different.’
Believing harmful stereotypes that are fuelled by the media, whether it be in terms of a person’s gender, race, sexuality, or size, (anything that diverts away from the ethnocentric value system), ‘unbiased?’ It might as well be removed from the dictionary, when even the news, the one thing that we think we can rely on to give us all the facts, cannot be truly relied on…
Journalists: They tell us to celebrate our differences, and then they report on our grief for what being open about those differences causes.
Waving rainbow flags at pride today, holding the hand of a mum who just lost her son, the victim of a hate crime for being trans, tomorrow.
The source of all the division in the world, our differences are the catalyst to every war in the world where we fear what is unfamiliar to us.
Where bigotry fuelled division sees us needing to ‘come out on top’, at whatever cost.
Where distinguishing between fact and fiction is impossible when even the ‘fact checkers’ have their own agenda…
How can we ever know what’s truly real?
(We can’t).
There could be so much shit happening in the world right now that we have no idea about because the people whom we rely on to tell us simply aren’t telling us…
Terrifying.
It’s terrifying that we have no idea about what’s happening in the world unless we tune in to the news, yet we tune in to the news, and then we still don’t know what’s happening…
Nothing is certified.
And so, upon living with all of this uncertainty, is it any wonder that so many of us struggle in life?
When we are seemingly living through a mental health epidemic, we seek to gain control in any way that we can in a desperate bid to escape from the frightening reality that we have no control.
We have no control over anything in life, even our own thought processes, seemingly, where the news (that we should be able to trust) dictates what perspective we will hear from.
‘Man caught shoplifting’ donning the headlines when a white man is caught,
VS
‘DANGEROUS MAN WANTS TO STEAL FROM YOUR SHOPS AND STEAL YOUR JOBS’ when an ethnic minority is caught, the media uses their own prejudice to craft sensationalist headlines that lack any purpose other than to make scapegoats out of the already marginalised members of society…
But why?
The why lies in the unfamiliarity of that which we cannot understand, the ‘other.’
The source of our sense of having no control over our lives.
Yet instead of seeking to understand the ‘other’, instead of understanding the importance of culture and conversation and engaging with perspectives that are different to one’s own, as the middle classes would be more likely to, the working classes, having been brought up being shown that ‘violence is the answer’, tend to resort to just that, violence, in order to eliminate what they believe poses a ‘threat’ to their own values.
Feeling devoid of hope and disillusioned by the illusion that is ‘free will’, the working classes feel the need to resort to violence because…
What else do the powerless have to get the powerful to listen?
If your cries fall on deaf ears, you scream.
The above is a sentiment that people, suspectible boys in particular, are taught by society at large, whose systems of oppression exist to favour the middle classes while demonising the working classes, a system that doesn’t just allow for but aids in the rich getting richer as the poor get poorer.
The above is also a sentiment that people, suspectible boys in particular, are taught by their own families as well…
Having been brought up being told by the men in their lives that ‘violence is the natural resolution to disagreement’, they don’t know anything else… And therefore, instead of growing up with a healthy understanding of how to resolve disagreements, they remain a bunch of sad little boys who don’t know what to do with their emotions.
It is for this reason, the largely working-class rhetoric surrounding ‘taking back what is ours’, that far-right groups such as the EDL, for example, the English Defence League, are full of working-class men.
Feeling so out of control over their lives, violence is the only way they know how to feel a semblance of control within an uncontrollable world… And so, in the face of their powerlessness, they come together, remaining steadfast in their efforts to gain back something that no one has ever truly had* in the first place, control.
*’Something that no one has ever truly had’ because…
We’re born, having never asked to be here (we just woke up one day and found ourselves on this big rock in the middle of an infinite universe), and then we die, with the time in between spent being controlled by other people as we remain chained down by the very systems that we are told are there to ‘protect’ us.
Having never had control then, why are we so desperate to want it?
How to explain our collective grief…
We can’t want what we’ve never had, otherwise how we would know that we want it?
And so, the fact of the matter is that we must have had it [control] at some point… Not in this lifetime, granted, but once upon a time, it must have been there.
What more proof do we need than this that there was something* prior to this lifetime within which we were in control?
*(Important to note that this ‘something’ isn’t necessarily a place, but more so a state of mind, hence why I am such a big advocate for meditation. It works because it transports us back to a pure state of consciousness where we are in full control, where we have the control that we had before we entered into this society that took it all away from us, a society within which, even the systems of supposed ‘democracy’ and freedom exist to take it all away)…
^ Like politics, for example.
We align ourselves with a political party despite every party, no matter how ‘liberal’ they claim to be, existing to control us, and it is for this reason that I have a love-hate relationship with politics because…
For however long we have politicians in power, there will always be a superior/inferior, us vs them dynamic at play, and for however long there is that, there will always be one group of people being oppressed and controlled by another.
(And there will always be ‘another’)…
Whether that be in terms of sexuality, politics, race, or gender, there will always be differences in life, and that is what makes it [life] both beautiful and heartbreaking.
‘Beautiful’ because our differences create diversity in the world.
‘Heartbreaking’ because our diversity, as above, is the source of so much conflict in the world.
Alas, there is hope.
As a society, we have a duty, to young boys in particular, to show them the way.
We have the power to influence…
We owe it to our daughters and our granddaughters to create a generation of women who can leave their house at any time, day or night, and not have to weigh up whether it’s really worth the risk of not getting home.
We owe it to all the women who haven’t made it home to be a force of change.
Because for however long boys are being taught that it’s acceptable to take something if they’re not given it, boys turned men will continue to take and take and take until the tap runs dry and we’re all left weeping at yet another girl’s graveside questioning…
Why?
For however long we have no control, people will seek to gain it, and for however long boys are being taught that violence is the way, men will continue to take it.
‘Little boys are moldable, it’s men who scare me.’
Portfolio of Hope 