I’m used to losing people I love. Whether it’s actual loss like the death of my
brother at 17 or my mum at 77, or emotional loss like my mum’s slow development
of Alzheimer’s or my learning disabled daughter going to residential school, I’m quite familiar
with the concept.
Being a carer for
twenty years also familiarised me with the notion of being a loser. Because
when your needs and wishes are superseded by actual needs and advocacy for 3
other people, you have to adjust to your position of failed hopes because
otherwise you fail people whose lives depend on you.
I’m 47 now so in the
years that I stood back from ambition and desire and career and status, I was
able to learn things about myself and about life that gave me clarity of
viewpoint.
In short I learnt what
mattered. I learnt that empathy is a gift, which comes naturally to some and
one which definitely should be valued much more than it is. I feel it’s so
lacking in our dealings with one another that it really should be taught in
schools.
In recent weeks we’ve
seen that the lack of empathy, which is so crucial to our humanity has
entrenched itself on social networking sites. People write messages to one another,
which are sometimes criminal like threats or are morally criminal, like
bullying.
Either the lonely
individual venting at high profile people from their safe place of anonymity or
more worryingly people with a platform deciding to organise and orchestrate
attacks on those people they deem to have transgressed.
It is those people who
are the most worrying to me.
Andy Warhol said that
in the future all of us would be famous for fifteen minutes. I’ve tried in the
fifteen minutes I’ve had, spread over five years of online campaigning, to make
sure my time counted.
I haven’t always succeeded
and I haven’t always been polite but the horrors unfolding for many disabled
people, whether hate crime in our streets or policy from our legislators has
made me acutely aware that there are real lives at stake again. These lives
have value to me.
So I’ve used my time
to tell these stories, I’ve used my time to shout up.
What I’m seeing now is
that these raised voices on social media, spreading out into actual media, are
not shouting up but instead shouting at, their perceived targets.
The crimes their targets
stand accused of are not crimes of actual transgression but of perceived
transgression. Myths begun by bullying mobs are spreading like the norovirus
they truly are and like the norovirus they are composed of bile and excrement. Clones
with the same values further this perversion of truth and frustrated ambition;
the mobs are now dominating all online debate and conversation with a reign of terror,
which ensures that too many people are being silenced or hounded into
submission.
Meanwhile racists,
misogynists, homophobes, disablists and the religious right can stand back with
a self-satisfied smile and watch as their work is being done for them. Because
now those who would formerly have challenged such bigotry across social media,
are removing themselves from these platforms, because the mobs are wrongly
accusing them of the very things they fight against.
The mobs so assured of
their own correctness, are simply ensuring that the only voices being heard are
theirs and they are venomously attacking the wrong people.
In their dogged
pursuit of this one objective they are failing everyone else. They want their
voices to be heard but they fail to recognise the crucial flaw in their
determination is that they are incapable of listening. Their message is one of
denigrating others and as they vent their own agenda of personal ‘injustice’
they silence those who speak of actual injustice affecting millions of people.
There has never been a
more crucial time to dance in the light and to broaden the light to those who
are standing in the shadows but those occupying the social media stage
currently seem to have forgotten why they claim to be there.
Women attacking other
women, activists, attacking other activists and fracturing political agendas of
selfhood, are demeaning the struggle so bravely fought for around the world.
Our artists, writers, storytellers, journalists, campaigners and musicians have a wealth
of real stories to tell.
Yet the poverty of
activism which now seems to dominate our media of “he said” “she said” of article
and counter article, of sound bites and quotes and ‘who did what to whom’ is
predicated on a “what about me” ideology and it’s slowly suffocating actual debate.
We need to recognise and grieve for this loss, as it's a huge debasement of the forum of vital debate.
Stand back, rethink
and for the sake of us all, make your fifteen minutes count, make it mean
something other than your own ego, or please hand the microphone to someone
else.
