meta-journalling / do not mind your own business in the face of suffering / bystanders are worse
I didn't do that bad this month with posting every day, but I missed 8 days so I didn't do great either. I really want to share daily, so I'm going to share little bits and pieces on purpose, instead of just as filler. Here's something I wrote in response to someone claiming that when it comes to oppression, they mind their own business and put on a happy mindset: The problem is that minding your own business is at least half of the reason that evil continues. If people minded their own business, there would be no child labor laws, no true citizenry for anyone other than white landowning men, and it would still be legal to for a man to rape a woman so long as he had the proper document (slave papers, marriage license). And there are widespread horrific problems today, like the prison industrial complex that is basically a new form of slavery. To mind one's own business while others suffer is to condone the evil that makes them suffer. So we have to learn, and we have to pay attention to people other than ourselves, find out what is needed to stop the suffering. If you are not the one suffering you can't figure out how to fix it: only those with the experience can tell you what will work.
Along the same lines, I feel if you watch someone suffer and do nothing, you are WORSE than the perpetrator. I say this because I felt far more betrayed by those who saw and did nothing than I did by the people who actually sexually abused me. Bystanders should absolutely be prosecuted as accessories to any violent crime, unless there is reasonable fear for their own safety. In a crowd of bystanders saying nothing and doing nothing while watching one person assault another without a weapon, all those pieces of shit should be thrown in prosecuted as much as the one who did it. Make that a law and there would be far fewer shitty people condoning rape and other hate crimes.
I've been doing a whole lot of interacting on facebook and that feels rather like screaming into a void, because those threads happen and are buried and forgotten. I want to be more consistent about saving my comments and putting them in my LJ.
Along the same lines, I feel if you watch someone suffer and do nothing, you are WORSE than the perpetrator. I say this because I felt far more betrayed by those who saw and did nothing than I did by the people who actually sexually abused me. Bystanders should absolutely be prosecuted as accessories to any violent crime, unless there is reasonable fear for their own safety. In a crowd of bystanders saying nothing and doing nothing while watching one person assault another without a weapon, all those pieces of shit should be thrown in prosecuted as much as the one who did it. Make that a law and there would be far fewer shitty people condoning rape and other hate crimes.
I've been doing a whole lot of interacting on facebook and that feels rather like screaming into a void, because those threads happen and are buried and forgotten. I want to be more consistent about saving my comments and putting them in my LJ.