On indifference to injustice
My friend gave me a lift to work yesterday; if we were living in Australia, that would be illegal.
What a weird sentence to type.
How can a world exist where a friend giving another friend a lift could be liable for an AUD$11,000 fine and/or imprisonment for 6 months? It should be an impossibility. It should be a fiction, not a fact.
I can imagine there’s not a few of you who are shrugging as you read this: so what? Serves the unvaccinated right, right? We should just comply and obey and be more like everyone else.
If you feel that way, and especially if you feel that way and you are from an otherwise minoritised community, please inspect your emotions and thoughts right now. Please map the terrain of your heart and mind and remember why it is that you do not care about this particular discrimination, or think it serves the unvaccinated right. Are you bored of me banging on about this? Remember that.
Why?
Because now you know exactly why so many people are indifferent to racism or transphobia or “woke” politics more generally. Now you inhabit their psychology, share their fatigue, and match their selfish lack of justice. How little you care about the basic rights and civil liberties of unvaccinated people, is how little the anti-woke battalion care about you. Your indifference sits cheek by jowl with theirs in the waiting room of injustice.
Now you and they are sharing a mirror. Embrace your kin.