Medicated Thoughts 1
Jul. 28th, 2020 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mesotablarThese are rambling thoughts I had connect up while I was on strong painkillers on and off for the past 2 months. This one is a sort of philosophical piece as my brain was trying to make sense of things going on in the world. These are just my own opinion, my drugged brain opinion at that, so I don't expect many people will agree but maybe it might prompt you to think about things in a different way for a few minutes.
So I for a couple of weeks I was hopped up on good strong pain medication and my brain soup joined a whole bunch of weird thoughts which I have decided some are worth writing about.
Content Warning: Violent things are mentioned
The Black Lives Matter rallies/protests/rebellions were making the news constantly. World news, national news and local news. One clip in particular caught my attention, an Aboriginal woman questioned why it took the death of a Black man in America to get this sort of public support, when racism and death in custody has been an issue in Australia since the beginning (racism even arguably before colonisation, see The Racist Pirate).
Why has it been the murder of George Floyd that acted as the spark? I don’t live in America, I generally avoid American news media, yet even I know some names and basic circumstances of other Black lives snuffed out in extrajudicial executions. What made George Floyd so different from Freddie Gray, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor or Atatiana Jefferson? Or David Dungay, Rebecca Maher or Tanya Day?
Then there was a news clip about more panic buying at supermarkets and my drug fogged brain made a connection. It wasn’t so much a matter of who but a matter of the social climate. True, maybe it was a matter of the straw that broke the camel’s back, society just had enough and took a stand. However, what is truly different this time is the pandemic. Suddenly there is barely any stability in the world, businesses are winding down, and things are stretching thin. Suddenly all these people don’t know if they will have a job tomorrow or a place to live next week. Their fear and anxiety filled the air like gas. Almost every country is touched. The global horror on the news and outside your door thickening the air with fear as choking as car exhaust.
Into this atmosphere filled with volatile emotions we got a spark, a murder captured on film.
[I left this unfinished for over a week because I got sick and I decided to change the point of this entry because of what has happened since then]
I was going to write about an adaption of Mark Juergensmeyer’s concept of ‘Religious Terrorism as Performance Violence’. How the framing of George Floyd’s death fit into a performance because of how the police acted during, how the witnesses didn’t act, how the news spread and how the early reactions were covered in the media. Ultimately it wasn’t just a murder, because the way it was documented it became an act of performative violence. Unlike Juergensmeyer’s paper this terrorist act was not religious,
it was an act of racial terrorism,
authoritarian terrorism,
plutarchy terrorism.
I’m unsure about the current continuation of action in the US because I haven’t continued following the news while I was sick, and at least in Australia there is another movement that is of concern. The second wave fears of COVID 19 are getting stronger. Panic buying hostility has morphed to mask wearing hostility. The atmosphere is filling with gas again, volatile components waiting for the next spark.
And China is getting hostile.
So I for a couple of weeks I was hopped up on good strong pain medication and my brain soup joined a whole bunch of weird thoughts which I have decided some are worth writing about.
Content Warning: Violent things are mentioned
The Black Lives Matter rallies/protests/rebellions were making the news constantly. World news, national news and local news. One clip in particular caught my attention, an Aboriginal woman questioned why it took the death of a Black man in America to get this sort of public support, when racism and death in custody has been an issue in Australia since the beginning (racism even arguably before colonisation, see The Racist Pirate).
Why has it been the murder of George Floyd that acted as the spark? I don’t live in America, I generally avoid American news media, yet even I know some names and basic circumstances of other Black lives snuffed out in extrajudicial executions. What made George Floyd so different from Freddie Gray, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor or Atatiana Jefferson? Or David Dungay, Rebecca Maher or Tanya Day?
Then there was a news clip about more panic buying at supermarkets and my drug fogged brain made a connection. It wasn’t so much a matter of who but a matter of the social climate. True, maybe it was a matter of the straw that broke the camel’s back, society just had enough and took a stand. However, what is truly different this time is the pandemic. Suddenly there is barely any stability in the world, businesses are winding down, and things are stretching thin. Suddenly all these people don’t know if they will have a job tomorrow or a place to live next week. Their fear and anxiety filled the air like gas. Almost every country is touched. The global horror on the news and outside your door thickening the air with fear as choking as car exhaust.
Into this atmosphere filled with volatile emotions we got a spark, a murder captured on film.
[I left this unfinished for over a week because I got sick and I decided to change the point of this entry because of what has happened since then]
I was going to write about an adaption of Mark Juergensmeyer’s concept of ‘Religious Terrorism as Performance Violence’. How the framing of George Floyd’s death fit into a performance because of how the police acted during, how the witnesses didn’t act, how the news spread and how the early reactions were covered in the media. Ultimately it wasn’t just a murder, because the way it was documented it became an act of performative violence. Unlike Juergensmeyer’s paper this terrorist act was not religious,
it was an act of racial terrorism,
authoritarian terrorism,
plutarchy terrorism.
I’m unsure about the current continuation of action in the US because I haven’t continued following the news while I was sick, and at least in Australia there is another movement that is of concern. The second wave fears of COVID 19 are getting stronger. Panic buying hostility has morphed to mask wearing hostility. The atmosphere is filling with gas again, volatile components waiting for the next spark.
And China is getting hostile.