It’s time to stop being nice. It’s time to stop grinning and waving and nodding and apologising when someone bulldozes their way through the things you care about. The rape apologists, the blokes calling women’s sport ‘unwatchable’ despite never watching, the Catholic guilt, the deniers, the minimisers, the ‘jokes-on-you I don’t even care’-rs, the judgemental holier-than-thou-ers, the laugh in your face if you dare to be different vanilla basic dickheads.
We’ve seen it happen here, with the rise of the Teal Independents and the rejection of dogma in the hope of genuine action. We cannot rely on documents written for a different time and place. We cannot wish for an easier and better time, because it doesn’t exist. We have the here and now and there are only lessons to be learnt. We need to embrace community, not control.
However the gatekeepers are not about community, they are about control. The gatekeepers are the ones who are backed by faceless men with money up to their eyeballs to promote tradition and custom and the degradation of the planet for the good of the select few (and a lot of fucking money).
It’s time to stop worshipping, glorifying and promoting dogma and procession and ‘the way it should be’ and think about the way we can promote creativity, boundary pushing, free thought within the confines of respect for each other. Respect, not niceness. Respect a right to our own voice, respect the hard choices people have to make, respect the lives of people who get by on so little and get bullied and bashed when things go wrong.
We can have a discussion, a debate, a conversation, but only if the first contact is not to mock, patronise, gaslight, manipulate or control.
Fuck being polite. Fuck being nice. Fuck minimising yourself to a shadow in the crowd. No one is born to rule. Critical thought is conscious thought. Study, culture, free thought and expression outside of the box is fucking important and art matters. Our independent lives matter.
The Ebbs and The Flows. 