Meanwhile… 020
One day I hope that the entire way that we view education has a massive overhaul where the focus isn’t foremostly on academics, but also emotional values, equity and simply teaching children how to be respectful of one another, regardless of who those others are, and to equally value themselves.
There’s no money in that, though, is there. That also needs to change. And it is. Some countries are very much on top of it by introducing a focus on emotional well-being as being of as much worth as economic well-being, along with recognising that the two do go hand in hand.
2020, with its pandemic of COVID-19 sweeping the world, was the main instigator of my beginning this series. That was in January when the first notion of what this might become began to bloom.
It’s now June as I write this, and I can’t even fathom how quickly the world has turned. Throughout the world, of all the responses to the pandemic, the most astonishing to watch has been the response in America – or more specifically, the response from Trump.
In what was already a tenuous period in not just his own nation’s history, but that of the world, Trump chose to continue his on-brand methodology of lying, contradicting himself, and bluffing his way through “leadership”.
The nation was already ablaze when a police officer, staring brazenly into the camera of someone filming him, held his knee upon the neck of George Floyd for just over 9 minutes. He knew the man was dying. Passers-by and those filming were telling him so, while three other officers who’d also helped pin George Floyd down, also did their damnedest to stop any of those citizens from stepping in to help, one of whom was an off-duty fire-fighter who told them that she knew her job and could tell that George Floyd could NOT breathe.
America has a long history of Black people being murdered by the police with the police not being held to account. Australia does also. We’ve always known it. Some of us try to change that by supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and similar movements here in Australia with the Deaths In Custody that continue to plague the Aboriginal people in Australia to this day.
Naturally, people in America were angry. Black people in America were angry. Black people were already dying in higher numbers due to the pandemic because of racial inequality, being classed as “essential services” while also being denied the same access to health care as white people. This was all also barely two months after Breonna Taylor, an innocent 26 year-old black woman, was shot at least 8 times and killed by police in a dubiously botched raid (with no body-cam’s switched on). These are just two names among many. Far too many and for far too long.
So people protested. And they did so peacefully.
This was only weeks after WHITE protesters, armed with semi-automatic weapons, had been protesting in Michigan at the House Chambers, instilling enough fear in local government to shut down their proceedings one day. Donald Trump praised these people, as well as protesters in other states who during a pandemic roadblocked access to hospitals, as simply being frustrated people who just wanted to be heard. His subsequent tweets at this time were beyond inflammatory. During these protests, with WHITE people brandishing firearms and storming their way into local government, police responded passively, maintaining a barricade and doing no more than that.
The peaceful protests of the death of George Floyd, the deaths of ALL black lives lost to police violence in America, was swiftly branded by Trump as “thuggery” and he acted as such. The police, and soon other forces, including the military, are now as a rule meeting peaceful protests with hostile force, attacking protesters, bystanders, the press. People have lost the use of their eyes, having had gas canisters and rubber bullets fired at them from close range.
Why? Because the message within these protests is one of equality. It’s one with a voice for the downtrodden, for the Black community who suffers and dies in disproportionate numbers that have NEVER been acceptable.
Why say this? Because Michigan. Because Trump. Because objective facts.
It’s very much the same here in Australia with our Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a mediocre portrayal of “leadership” who covets only self-interest and even aspires to align himself with Trump as though it’s a good thing.
With protests gathering momentum in other countries across the world in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, Morrison has been very vocally against such a thing, whereas 3 weeks earlier, WHITE protesters concerned about the COVID-19 virus being passed by 5G phone network towers had the right to openly protest and voice their concerns, going as far to say, in his words, “it’s a free country”.
It’s not. Morrison, much like Trump, bought his position of power through lobbying.
But he was also aided, like Trump, by ignorance. By misinformation. By too many people simply believing what they wanted to hear because it catered to not only their point of view, but also their prejudice.
That’s always been an inherent problem in politics, especially when there’s long been an entrenched two-party system.
Along the way, politics garners the same loyalty that one sees within the fervour of sports and supporting a team. But loyalty doesn’t equate to logic. Loyalty that asks you to ignore logic – especially to the detriment of others or yourself – is abuse.
Trump in the US, Morrison in Australia, Johnson in the UK with Brexit cementing his position, Bolsonaro in Brazil and many more… these are people who rely on misinformation to rally the worst of people’s spirits, uniting with only division, dividing with lies about unity. And people believe them because they don’t question what they hear. Granted, there’s elements of this on both sides of the political fence at times, but only one side is content with people dying. The divide between accepting that has never been wider than it is now in the supposedly “free” worlds that make up those of the “West”.
Information, when it’s the truth, is the bridge.
But people need to want to walk that bridge.
They need to want to ask those questions, and answer them with facts.
That’s why this. The world is built on our children.
We need to teach them to think, to question, to feel.
We need to teach them to be better people, not better employees.
And we need to do it now.