Despair

“This is a revolution, not a public relations movement”

March 10, 2010 Despair

[TRIGGER WARNING: extreme hatred/violence discussed]

There are moments/days where I read something so horrifying that I just utterly despair of society, of who we are, what we do, the people we produce, of the possibility of change and equality, of ‘humanity’.

Today’s story about a man in a wheelchair who was beaten (beaten doesn’t quite get at the brutality of the attack) with metal bars, punched, kiched, ‘stomped on’ by two teenage boys.

Even when I spend a lot of time thinking about masculinity and the pressure on boys to be ‘hard’, ‘mean’, ‘unfeeling’, even when I’ve spent time studying and thinking about the fear/hatred directed at ‘othered’ bodies, even when I’ve heard again and again and again the stories of friends subjected to violence because of that fear/hatred…even when I know the level of violence out there – there are just some moments where I cannot comprehend THAT MUCH HATE. I can’t even fathom how it can occur. How two people could have that much rage/cruelty/callousness within them. How it is that we produce this over and over and over. There’s a disconnect in my brain: I get the theory, but I don’t get the choices people make, I don’t understand the reality of it emotionally – how it’s possible to *feel* like that and to *act* like that.

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Permalink # Jo Tamar said

I had the same reaction to that story.

From your other post – the world really does need more baby elephants. Or something.

*sigh*
Permalink # Don said

Not acceptable. I have no tolerance for this behaviour. It shits me the violence that’s happening and we need to get tough, ‘d rmv thr lgs nd st thm fr t lv thr lvs in whl chr.
Permalink # fuckpoliteness said

Don – from what I’ve seen of you here I like you.

But I disemvowelled the last part of your message. While I understand a reaction of absolute fury and disgust, I can’t publish a comment that advocates that kind of violence or retribution. I understand you probably *wouldn’t* literally do such a thing or recommend it in seriousness but I still can’t publish it even if it’s a ‘joke’.

Separately to the violence/retribution element I am discomforted by the implication that if you would do this as a ‘punishment’ that ‘lives in a wheelchair’ is a punishment…it implies that life in a wheelchair is ‘less than’.

Also (and I’m being drawn into making bigger points here, I’m not meaning for it to come off as a total thrashing of you) – meeting violence with violence doesn’t do much to undo the fact that it’s aggression/violence and ‘toughness’ that lead to this sort of heinousness – I don’t believe that getting ‘tough’ by way of physical retaliations or rigidity is an answer.
Permalink # attack_laurel said

This is one of those times when we can say “Well, the Patriarchy hurts men too”, since clearly it is the mandate that men must be violent and brutal is informing this act, but holy hell, this is a clear case of the Patriarchy hurts the Othered much, much more.

And why, WHY?! is it considered so manly and macho to attack someone who is clearly at a huge disadvantage? This is the outcome of this fucking “disabled people are inspirational but I don’t want to have anything to do with them unless I benefit” attitude that was made so clearly at the Oscars with the documentary “Prudence Sings” (I think that’s the name). Disabled people are props, nothing more, and therefore can be treated like objects, not people.

There’s something so fundamentally broken about this. And watch for the “He’s such a nice boy” apologists to come out of the woodwork, just to add an extra heaping helping of shit on top of the sundae, making it clear that it’s not the victim who matters, it’s the violent sociopath whose life might be “ruined” because they chose to commit an unthinkable act, but apparently should be protected from the consequences.

Here is where I give up and just scream in incoherent rage. D:<
Permalink # Spilt Milk said

You have beautifully articulated my feelings of disbelief and despair over this ‘incident’. (In the newspapers it’s an incident, for the man attacked and all who know him, and for all people who use wheelchairs, and for all of us with ‘othered’ bodies, it was so much more than an incident. I don’t even know what the word is for this.)
Permalink # Kowalski said

I seem to have constant arguments about everyday disablism on the Internet, and whenever I object to someone’s choice of words that imply disability = bad, or disabled people’s lives must be tragic, they point me towards heinous examples of hate in attempt to come across as the Good Guys™.

See, the article said the man is “Wheelchair bound” and “confined to a wheelchair” instead of calling him a wheelchair user. The media portrays disabled people as overtly weak and helpless who must be protected by the non-disabled, the whole charity and compassion thing, it’s very similar to how women are portrayed in a rape culture, i.e. those feeble women must be protected by decent men.
In other words we’re just here to make you feel better, and if we fail at this, we are hated more openly.

Btw, armchair diagnosing violent people as sociopaths is one of the ways to say us Normals = good people, so bad people must have a mental illness. (see here.)
Permalink # fuckpoliteness said

Yes – I was discomforted in reading the article with ‘wheelchair bound’ etc, and I was concerned in writing the post about whether I was radiating a message of ‘people who use wheelchairs need my patronising concern’. At the same time it appears on reading the articles that these two guys set upon this man purely because he was in a wheelchair – because his body looked or worked differently and because it would be more difficult to get away from them. Things that add to me thinking it was entirely *about* him using a wheelchair (apart from the fact that again and again there are aggressive attacks on bodies that aren’t signifying ‘Straight White Able Bodied* Macho Man’) include them using parts of his own wheelchair to beat him with. That’s where I just start crying: it seems so clearly about hatred, about ‘punishment’.

And that is something I try to pick up in comments and didn’t do this morning – that our culture produces this fear and this anger and this hatred, that it isn’t the case that there must be an underlying ‘pathology’ to have that much ‘hate’ and to always decide that there is undermines the hatred that society produces on a routine basis, excuses society from the attitudes that underly these sorts of attacks.

Thanks for your link Kowalski, I particularly liked:

Oh nooooooo, you Normals would never be mean, cruel, vicious, dangerous, scary and violent! When someone goes on a killing spree, they must be insane, wacky, crazy, mad, deranged, lunatic, out of their minds, emotionally unstable, and any other word that implies mental illness is the cause for their behaviour.

Not only do you insinuate that a Normal state of mind is somehow superior, you’re also patently wrong. People with mental illnesses don’t commit more crimes than Normals.
Permalink # Kowalski said

Thank you!
I should clarify that I didn’t think your post was patronizing, but the press article was.

@ Attack_Laurel,
it’s a disability rights issue, and while it intersects with other kinds of oppression, it’s too simple to make it “a patriarchy hurts men, too” issue. You’re making feminism the main issue and all other kinds of oppression a thing that just comes along with it.
Permalink # Briqan Powell said

It isn’t ‘hatred’ as such that causes this crap to happen, it’s more that they can do it. When idiots like this have to face any kind of consequence afterwards, their whole worlds fall apart. These are ‘people’ who have never been taught about consequences. They have never been told No, you cannot do that.
Permalink # fuckpoliteness said

I don’t really know what to say to that – hatred/fear of ‘othered’ bodies is pretty well documented. I don’t think you beat the crap out of someone with pipes just because someone said ‘Hey, by the way, beating the crap out of someone with metal pipes is not on’. I think there needs to be an element of hatred and ‘you deserve this viciousness because [insert fucked up logic]’ to attack someone in such a manner.

I also think that the ‘these people have just never been taught right from wrong’ takes the responsibility of their actions of them/society and puts it back onto individual parents.

I also don’t think they’re just ‘idiots’ – a silly action is to throw popcorn during a movie, not viciously beat someone.
Permalink # Kowalski said

Brian, it is hatred and people like you create the breeding ground for it. It’s not crap that happens in a void.
Read my earlier comment (#6) because you’re doing exactly that, you call vicious people, “people” (No True Scotsman fallacy) because to you people are good and when they’re not you insult them with an outdated diagnostic term for disabled people, because disability is seen as bad, and then you’re *shocked* that there’s violence against disabled people. Or should I say “people”?
Permalink # Kowalski said

Sorry, *Briqan*
Permalink # Jo Tamar said

Also, Briqan, the fact that this happened in Mount Druitt means that there is a pretty good chance that the people who did this have spent a lot of their lives haering “No, you cannot do that”, and in particular, hearing it as “No, you cannot do that”. They also have probably observed (and perhaps been subject to) fairly stringent discipline by the police. Not commenting about parents because those sorts of things can’t be generalised anywhere near as much as what we can assume about what these kids may have seen socially.

I’m not saying that as an excuse or even an explanation – I’m rebutting your suggestion that lack of discipline or being told “no” explains their actions.

No, I’m with FP and Kowalski. I think it’s down to hatred. And some of that hatred may well stem from a feeling that the whole world is against them, a philosophy for which they may well have collected a significant amount of empirical evidence.
Permalink # attack_laurel said

*ugh*. I was *not* saying it’s about feminism. I’m saying this is a typical argument made when people twist themselves into pretzels to see the perpetrator’s side of the story, and make excuses, not that it’s a valid argument.

And I don’t get being lectured on the use of “sociopath”. It is a personality disorder that is characterized by precisely this kind of behaviour, and I’m not armchair diagnosing, I’m saying that people who commit this kind of crime and show no sign of empathy for their victim are sociopaths, by the very defiinition. I took great care with that word, because it is too easy for people to fall back on “crazy”, “nuts”, or some other description that maligns people with mental illness.
Permalink # attack_laurel said

Eurgh. Please substitutes “Not trying to armchair diagnose”. *needs more coffee*
Permalink # Kowalski said

Huh? Can you please define “armchair diagnosing”?
Because you’re totally contradicting yourself here.
You’re saying you’re not trying to do it, and then go on to justify why you do it.
Permalink # Weekend Linkfest « Here Be Dragons said

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