Unforsaken

Full of hatred, discrimination,

buzzing from the power

of your guns and tasers –

you make judgement calls

as though you have the right

to say who lives or dies.

****

I see you,

we see you,

as you pick off our Black

friends like your ancestors did.

****

You stomp through lives

like you’re above all others.

You kneel on necks,

choke-hold innocents,

ignore pleas for help,

for a simple

breath.

****

The cycle goes on

without you learning.

You screw up the balls of paper

that scream this world’s true

history; implant it with lies

that paint you as the best,

the only, the supreme.

****

Your statues of Jesus,

with his lovely peached skin:

He was Yeshua, brown

and loving of all.

Princess Andromeda,

depicted as white:

a native Ethiopan

she glistened with black beauty.

****

Centuries of blood shed

as you stomped across the globe

sticking flags in the earth

like you did to the moon.

But as you landed on far-flung

shores, welcomed by Natives

you pierced their trust

with swords, muskets and arrogance.

The land wasn’t empty,

you stole it with audacity.

The gall of it all – you stood

on the bones

of children,

erased them,

secluded them,

murdered them.

****

You stand on those bones,

dehumanise their pain.

You crush their hope

like weeds in the cracks

of your concrete patio.

But they are wild roses,

and we are their thorns.

Their roots have entwined

beneath the soil of the dead.

****

Summer has come,

the flowers are erupting,

blossoming, alive.

****

Copyright © 2020 Hannah Edge. All rights reserved.

History is Critical

I look to the future and think fuck.

I’m an elder-millennial, a statesman (sorry, modernity – statesperson). I’m neither a gen z snowflake nor an old gen x chauvinist. So hear me now. I watch both sides clash in the fields of Facebook and Twitter. Both of you fighting for your voice and squashing the others.

I was raised by the Boomers and my peers were a healthy mix of gen x and y. It gives me perspective, for which I’m wise enough to appreciate and savour. This world is completely fucked and people are cockroaches. You all sit on your high and mighty pedestals expecting all before you to kowtow to your un-researched assertions. You see a headline on your Facebook page and run a winding marathon with it. No source check, no actual reading of the article. Just indignation and anger that it doesn’t say what you think it should.

It must hurt, to be called a snowflake. It is derogatory. But all degradation comes from somewhere. As a millennial raised by boomers I saw it coming. We were called over sensitive mard-arses, but in reality, we were fighting to give everyone a voice, which halleluyah we now have (despite what many think). The Boomers before me made one heck of a start. Gay prides and Stonewall were still novel on my 90s/00s scene, but I looked up to the 40-somethings that had been brave enough to stand up and start the fight for equality. We didn’t start it, but by all the gods, we took up their mantle – louder, stronger, more of us and beat the homophobia with sticks and rocks. We stood strong watching proudly as people in the first world finally started to chill the fuck out about anything that wasn’t deemed ‘normal’ according to what they had been taught.

What is that norm? White, preferably male, 2.4 children, heterosexual, binary, females to be a size 6-8 with heels and lashings of sophisticated make-up.

The fight continues, of course it does. A century or two of oppression and silencing the actual masses will do that. It also has to be loud, because it’s been 60 years of protests and parades and there are still those that need to see this and swallow it.

It is human nature to dislike change, I understand that now I’m on the water-slide to 40. It is human nature to reject change and progress. So instinctively, people will reject our fights for freedom to be who the hell we are. But we shouldn’t. It is wrong.

I think gen z needs to hear this. It is doing the same as the boomers but with far left principles instead of far right. It takes real balls to listen to the opposition. You don’t have to agree with it, just respect that it differs from your own beliefs and values… I’m not telling you to condone their racist, homophobic drivel. Merely be the better person and educate. There is no need to ram your beliefs down their throat, screaming they are wrong. Human nature will just kick in if you do, and you will simply make them more steadfast in their beliefs.

I see now, that shows I watched and savoured as a child are being banned. I get it, but at the same time, I don’t. Friends fat-shamed and trans-dismissed. Little Britain, when taken out of context, mocks the disabled, and Matt Lucas was young enough to know better than to black-up. But ban them?

Why?

When I was growing up and looked back at the shows my folks watched, offensive homo-stereotypes (Are You Being Served – Mr Humphries), whites blacking up (Monty Python), disabilities mocked (Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Them – Frank Spencer), women like Babs Windsor (Carry On films) – platinum blonde and huge boobs… I never once thought those shows should be banned. I saw them as art of its time (and place in history). I saw it as an amazing guide on how far we have progressed. I saw them as tools to better my own generation. I looked at them in the historical context with which they merited.

Just like the shows of the 90s now.

I can take this further. I have quietly watched over the last decade as people have kicked off at portraits in universities (think Rudyard Kipling), statues throughout the country (think Winston Churchill), that ‘celebrate’ the slave trade.

You are correct. It is wrong, incredibly wrong, to celebrate the life of someone who hurt others for no other reason than the colour of their skin, simply for financial gain… But I, and many others, don’t ‘celebrate’ these people. We investigate their history, we use it to better today. History is a tool. A tool to learn and evolve from, to take the next step towards a more enlightened society. To erase it is dangerous. For if we cannot see the mistakes of our history, we won’t evolve. We will slip backwards.

Churchill was a racist, chauvanistic, privileged white male.  Because he was raised in a period by people who deemed this to be the ‘correct’ way to be ‘civilised’.  Had he been born in 1983, would he have held those same values?  Unlikely.

Did you know that the Victorians banned much of Greek classical literature? Because it depicted an enlightened society, where to be homosexual was fine, and just a passing observation irrelevant to the actual stories being told.

If you squash the history you squash evolution and enlightenment.