Sounding off

Is closing this blog tonight.  This is a bit like retiring from being queer, which I did five years ago.  People tell me that you can’t stop being queer, that it is something you’re born to.  It’s your identity.

And I ask, “Why not?” Being queer only matters if you have other people to be queer with, and I don’t.  It’s like, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it fall ... was it really queer?  Apparently not.  At least, not that I have noticed.

People do read my blog, I know.  When I post, many of my friends read it and profess to enjoy it - god bless them.  But I haven’t posted very often and they won’t notice if I stop.  I’ve been thinking about what I would like to do instead, though none of these ideas will come to pass before I finish studying – and even then, it’s doubtful.

All the same,  it’s time to stop this pretence now. And I have some things to say on the way out.  Yes, these things come from a place of anger and if you don’t like it:  fuck you.  You have never been there for me and you are not worthy of my courtesy, let alone my friendship. 

Because friendship is real.  It’s important. It’s true.   It can be painful, when your friends tell you things that you don’t want to hear, or vice versa.  Having permission to say those things, and hearing them, and finding ways to continue loving someone, and being there for them, is what makes a friendship true. 

You can probably tell, if you have got this far, that I have a few things to get off my chest.  Here is a a numbered list. 

     1. Fucking gender-correct wankers.  This may seem a surprising complaint, from someone who many would class as politically correct him/her self (note the PC pronoun).  Twenty years of living in Sydney with adolescent twats telling me what to think about gender, and what it means to be “differently gendered”.  Twenty years of being too polite to say: I was doing gender difference before the internet existed.  Try that. Try coming out with a book from the National Library under your arm, you condescending moron. 

      2.  Twenty years of gay men telling me what AIDS means, and how I am not allowed to have an opinion because I am just a woman and wouldn’t know.  Well, AIDS tore my family apart while you were shagging in a venue, and I think that working in an AIDS service is about trying to help people (though god knows, they don’t seem to want or need helping) and not about choosing the colour of the curtains, you lazy, corrupt, misogynist arsewipe. 

3. Other white people lording it over me about racism.  Like … wtf?  And your authority to speak about racism comes from … where??  Oh, I know: from criticising other white people who are trying to do the right thing.  So noble and true!  And so productive!!!  Tell me, I was at the Yarbun festival twenty years ago while you were playing with your girlfriend … I didn’t see you there??   But you have an opinion now, don’t you?  And it’s better than mine, of course.  And your opinion makes fuck all difference to anyone except your other white friends on Facebook, but in a twisted bourgeois virtue-signalling way that’s kind of the point, isn’t it??!

See, I grew up PC.  I got harassed in High School for being a “communist”.  That was back in the 80s, when being a “communist” was still a real insult.  After High School, I noticed that people would tell me how lucky I was to have had a woke upbringing when they - poor mites - had grown up in conservative oppression. 

And yet I didn’t feel lucky.  It took years for me to work out why this was.  The answer:  because my family, though it had many worthy opinions, was also riven with mental illness and abuse.  And the mental illness and abuse were expressed through the right-on politics. 

Ooooooh.  Oh dear.  That’s not good.  That’s not right.  Left-wing families are supposed to be happy and loving and supportive. 

Can’t talk about that, then.

So I didn’t, for years and years.  Well, fuck that.  Now I am 53 and I am talking to anyone who will listen (and many who won’t!) and here are some of the things I have learned: 

Your politics are about your ego.  They are inseparable.  Your politics may be good.  They may be righteous.  But where is your ego in them?  What role does it play?  Where is your ego invested, and how, and to what extent?  Why do you need to be right?  What happens when it turns out that you’re just plain fucking wrong?  And worse, that the people who were right are on the opposite political team?  Are you capable of admitting that, and saying so?  How does that feel?  Pretty humbling, eh?  Or would you just rather keep pretending that you are right and they are wrong?  How long can you keep that up?  Forever??!!

Your team isn’t always right.  In fact, sometimes they are flat-out wrong.  It could be that the opposing team have no better answer, or it could be that they are right.  I grew up watching  the left tacitly defend the totalitarian ideologues of the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War – and we were fucking wrong!  The Cold War was brutal and filled with lies but history has revealed the truth: the left got it wrong.  The same thing happened in Ireland, where the left tacitly supported the murderous thugs of the IRA.  Remember that?  How does that feel now?  Pretty shit, eh? Or are you still living in some delusional, ego-driven world where you are right and the people who lived through it are wrong??

Mental illness is everywhere, including on your team.  In fact, there is probably more of it on your team than anywhere.  I had a friend – lovely woman – who was so into Aboriginal reconciliation that she became convinced that she was Aboriginal.  And then a few years later when the whole of the western world was out to get Muslims, she became Muslim too.  She had beautiful intentions, but she had a fucking mental illness.

Our reluctance to name and call out mental illness destroys the collective endeavours that we pursue, and succeeds only in alienating those who are victims of the bullying and abuse that people with mental illness so often engage in. Because people with mental illness don't obey rules, duh.  

I have seen this happen over and over, and it is at its worst when people with an active mental illness manage to gain positions in services funded to assist the needy, vulnerable and oppressed.  They proceed to destroy the people they work with, and then the service, and through this, the people that service is supposed to help.  This is wrong and shameful, to everyone who claims to care about the needy, vulnerable and oppressed.  

  

One of the things that I learned over the last forty years is that … and still, I am loathe to admit this …my team ... my beautiful team of ethical, high-minded, freedom-loving friends, can be wrong.  Worse than that, they can be fascists.  They don’t care about democracy.  They don’t care about peace.  They don’t care about justice or the rule of law.  They care about these things only when the other team is found wanting, which is always.  Yeah, right.  What they really care about is winning, and revenge.  Sound familiar?   

If you read the social media, you will see your own team advocate violence, and breaking the law – even killing people.  You will see them insult and denigrate and abuse the people they don’t agree with, make all sorts of assumptions – knowing nothing – about the person they don’t agree with.  I understand that.  I agree with them.  That's ok, right?  Because it’s our team.  They are right.  We agree with them.  We feel just as angry and aggrieved as they do.  Click “like”!

Really?  Really??  Does the word “hypocrisy” have no meaning at all?  Or are we so utterly lacking in self-awareness that we don’t notice?  Or do we actually think this is ok??

I suspect it’s the latter.  Because it’s ok if it’s our team.  Our team is right. 

And here's another thing that I know:  I am sure glad these fuckers aren’t in charge of our country.  Because I, for one, have absolutely no faith that my own team of Chardonnay-sipping keyboard warriors would be any better than those that are in charge.  You need think only of the people that were on our team.  Think Stalin.  Think Mao. Think the Khmer Rouge.  And think … fuck you.  Fuck off.  I will think what I like, and no wanker can tell me who I should be or how I should feel. I'll think for myself.