None of us want to be here

We can't change the world, but we can listen.

I don’t want to be here. You don’t want to be here. None of us want to be here. Except for those who do.

Look, I’m not going to try and offer any solutions to what has been going on in this country, these last few days. I trust and presume that there are people who know far more about it than me.

But that’s not what this is really about. The last few days have felt like a widespread permeation of both helplessness and hopelessness, that a hateful minority are trying to take us down an alleyway that none of us should be going down.

At present, it seems certain that the riots are being targeted in areas where it is believed that there will be a strong counter-protest. So counter-protesting won’t be for most of us, but what can we do to do something about that feeling of helplessness?

I guess the answer is, listen. Listen to them. Listen to Black people and Brown people who may be feeling even more vulnerable and marginalised than ever. Let them speak. Take some of that emotional burden from them. Amplify their voices, if they’re in the public domain. Help them to be heard.

Remember that masks can be worn. People can present as being perfectly okay for so long as they have to in public. And remember that they have no obligation towards anyone whatsoever. It’s okay to be angry. It’s understandable to be scared. Just… listen.

It’s very easy to say, “It’ll be alright, most of us aren’t like that”, but that sentence is only half-right. Most of us aren’t like that. That is statistically provable. But this doesn’t mean that it’ll be alright. There is still a minority. It was small and it’s impossible to say for sure, but it looks for all the world like it’s growing.

Black and Brown people have known that these people exist their whole lives. It doesn’t matter if they’re a minority if you’re a minority yourself, as well. Don’t “yeah but” or “well actually” them when shops are being trashed, mosques are being attacked, and people are being pulled from their cars and beaten up on the basis of the colour of their skin.

I don’t think I can understand that fear. I don’t think I can understand how it feels. But I don’t feel as though I need to. Because I am human, I can empathise. For anybody who needs to see how it manifests in real time, well, social media is always available. There’s a lot of it about, right now.

“We’re better than this.”

Well, at the moment there’s demonstrable evidence that we’re not.

But we gain nothing by catastrophising and becoming paralysed with fear. All we do, in that eventuality, is hand a win to born losers. We win by standing firm, calling out hate, by amplifying voices that need to be amplified, and by listening. We do win in the end, because there are more of us than there are of them. And we win with love.