The Plan

I had planned today to do a review of ‘The Fades’, but I feel I can’t really justify having the word ‘news’ in the name without mentioning the death of Muammar Gaddafi. Don’t get me wrong here, I don’t know a lot about the whole Libya situation. At all.  What I do know is that we have to be careful now. A lot of people are probably going to be happy about his death, and I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that. To be glad that a person died, even if it is a person like Gaddafi or Bin Laden, as I said at the time, is something I don’t think I’m capable of. We have to be careful of our hatred, that it doesn’t make us like those we profess to direct it towards, revelling in death. That’s not the way human beings should do things. Since I don’t know anything about the whole situation, and have no wish to offend anybody, I’m going to leave it there for now. In fact, I should probably review The Fades when the series is actually finished, that might make more sense. Maybe I’ll have the opportunity to be dry and witty and the spinner of humorous yarn again. I miss knitting.

Japan

The recent events in Japan are truly terrible, and I really, really hope that those affected by it will soon find some resolution or comfort… I wonder whether they’re better equipped to deal with it than other countries due to the high frequency of earthquakes in the area and their good economical situation or whether this will be too much to deal with for a while. I don’t know, but my heart honestly goes out to everybody affected by what’s happened. I can’t really say anything more on that, but please spare a thought for those who are now living in reduced living standards or fear of radiation in Japan.

What?!

I read an article today about… well, you can go and read it yourself. The original Swedish can be found here and the English here… there is also a forum thread on the excellent Escapist website related to this story.

If you didn’t bother reading it, which I don’t massively begrudge you, then here’s the gist of it: A six-year-old Swedish boy was stabbed (although with a blunt knife) in the neck for wearing pink to school. The English article doesn’t go into much detail, but the Escapist thread, presumably started by somebody who knows at least rudimentary Swedish, explains that he’d been bullied for a while and called a girl, gay and so on because he likes pink and ballet and other such things usually associated with femininity. The most shocking thing about it, however, is that the original poster claims that the response of at least one member of staff went thus: ‘He shouldn’t have worn pink’.

What?

WHAT?!

Is society really this f***ed up? Are we so utterly horrified at the very prospect of offending a single person that we cannot hold people responsible for doing what are surely undeniably bad things? Extremists are brainwashed, killers troubled, bullies attention-seeking or with poor home lives – fine, perhaps they are, but we can never, ever so much as insinuate the merest shadow of the implication that what they do is not wrong.
I was told at school that bullies were sad, sad people – okay – who were just sad – fine so far – and troubled. Right. Much as that seems to raise those who are not bullies above those who are, it also does something else, and that is to hold the bully to be a victim of their situation. Now, call me pedantic, but I would have said that the bully is absolutely NOT the victim in this situation; I’d have said that the victim was the victim.
Yet this is almost reversed in far too many cases; I’ve known people who were bullied and who, upon taking their problem to their teachers – and almost every school operates a policy of ‘tell a teacher’, to the point that I’ve never heard of one that doesn’t – were actually made to feel further victimised, as if the harassment they suffered was their fault. In other words, as if it was their fault that they were miserable. The justification offered seems to be that the victims are bullied for being different, which is their fault, but this just doesn’t make any sense. How can we claim that anybody is not different in one way or another, and how can we stand for institutionalised injustice in a society which claims to cater for those who are different enough to merit recognition – how can those who aren’t different enough to be recognised as such, and protected as such, but don’t conform enough to save them from bullying (and there are uncountable numbers of people like this) be made to feel as if they are the victim for expressing their individuality when the very institution which claims to facilitate such expression justifies persecution for doing so?!

That sentence was so long, I don’t even understand it myself. Feel free to read it a few times, or do what I would probably have done and go and watch something on YouTube or something like that. If you’re still with me – and kudos to you if you are – then you’ll hopefully understand what I’m trying to say.
Yes, those who commit crimes and those who aggravate and those who bully – let us not forget that these three groups are regularly made up of the same people at different stages in their lives – are troubled. Yes, they have issues.
But they are not the victims of their actions. They should not be made to feel that there is any excuse for what they do. Those who are the victims should not be made to feel that they perpetuate their own troubles, that their own personalities are their own fault and that so, therefore, is any attack under which they may come.

Perhaps I’m being insensitive and bullies should all be told that they are allowed to be, and justified in being, a fairly major cause of suicides in young people, but I don’t think so.

The least important thing ever

I left St Peter’s C of E Aided School four months ago now, ish. Since then, it’s been in the local paper about six times, usually because it’s punished somebody massively disproportionately for their ‘crime’.

This is the latest from the newly dubbed ‘Double Standards Society’ and it’s only marginally more stupid than some of the other reports I’ve read lately, but it’s still probably the stupidest. Read the article, please, O seductive and astute reader. Now read it again, bearing in mind that these are real events happening at a school, which is licensed to teach things. While I was there, the student planner read – with no abriging or alteration, this is the full text with no gaps omitted, as it appears on a single page: ‘We are a Christian school who will show love and caring for one another. There will be no hugging, holding hands or kissing on the school premises.’

I’m tired and it was my birthday yesterday, so that’s it for today. Night.

In the absence of anything interesting to say…

I wonder why I see so many fire engines. They’ve always got their lights on, sirens wailing like an X Factor contestant who doesn’t realise how terrible they are, cutting through traffic in swathes of graceful curves, drifting through the crowded roads with such purpose. And yet I’ve never actually seen a fire.

By that, I mean of course that I’ve never seen something which seems as if it could possibly merit the use of a fire engine to extinguish it; I’m familiar, naturally, with the concept of fire, but I don’t believe I’ve ever witnessed, say, a house burning down. I’ve heard tell of the burnt shells of houses, destroyed in a raging inferno which almost invariably seems to have started from something along the lines of a pin-sized flame suddenly re-combusting with enough force to blow up the entire building.

Similarly, I must see at least three police cars a day, all with blaring sirens and flashing lights, and yet have never borne witness to a crime – to my knowledge. I was once (very briefly) questioned because I have a most irritating doppelgänger who looks EXACTLY like me and happens to be something of a minor criminal, but have never actually seen firsthand an actual crime; say, a mugging. Which strikes me as odd, considering that even my local paper must contain a ratio of assaults-to-other-mundane-news of about 4:1. So, statistically, for everything that’s been in the newspaper which I’ve witnessed or in some way been a part of, I ought also to have seen four acts of lawbreaking, and yet I haven’t.

Conspiracy?

Probably not.