Dance for life

This morning's mood is very much repeatedly watching a video of my friend BrittanySchorn's little two-year-old daughter on Facebook:

BrittanySchorn: Who's the Vice-President?
Daughter: Kam-ee-a! Kam-ee-a!

Meanwhile, another friend, based in Ohio but originally from Pittsburgh, said he had to pull over while driving and just cry with sheer relief at the thought that his pregnant wife's as-yet-unborn baby wasn't going to come into the world in Trump presidency.

My mother texted me to say that she and my sister were going out for celebratory drinks (in Australia it's Sunday night right now).

I just can't stop retweeting videos of Americans in big cities singing and dancing. I feel like we've stepped back from the edge of a cliff.

'Legitimate concerns'

There is a strand in popular media in the US which I first noticed when I was a teenager: a repeated narrative that characters whose parents, spouse, or other family members abused or neglected them had a moral obligation to immediately forgive them the instant the abusive/neglectful person attempted to reconcile. Often, this takes the form of the friends and family of the abused person insisting that this is the moral, healing, and compassionate thing to do, and to refuse forgiveness means a lack of 'closure,' and demonstrates a poisonous, corrosive bitterness. Such narratives reinforce the notion that a refusal to forgive is more damaging to the abused person than the abusive or neglectful behaviour they experienced.

I most often see this trope presented in media aimed at women, or at teenagers, but it's also there in the sorts of action films which assume a mainly adult male audience. Usually in the latter it takes the form of the manly, tortured antihero reconnecting with an ex-wife or ex-girlfriend (and sometimes their kids) in the wake of an apocalyptic catastrophe, or a smaller-scale violent threat. The woman will be aggrieved at some kind of past neglect (usually presented along the lines of the hero being so obsessed with the demands of his — dangerous, important, manly — job that he was a neglectful husband/partner/father). Again, by the end of the film she will be expected to be reconciled with the neglectful hero, and have come around to a recognition that his work was so, so important that of course it was unreasonable to have expected him to be a present, active partner.

Whether it's abuse or neglect, this kind of weaponised forgiveness seeps into everything. We're seeing it now with the calls for those of us celebrating a Biden/Harris victory to be empathetic and compassionate to those on the opposing sides. Somehow, this always seems to be what's demanded of those of us on the left of centre. When we lose an election or referendum, there are immediate calls to listen to the 'legitimate concerns' of frightened racists, and an expectation that we will bend over backwards to accommodate and legitimise their ideology. On the rare occasions when we win, we're told not to antagonise them by celebrating too happily, and commentators try to draw an equivalence between the disappointment they're feeling, and the sheer, bone-chilling terror we felt when they won.

When the Brexit result was announced, Brexiteers beat up a Polish man in the street, and started screaming abuse at people of colour and/or people they heard speaking English with non-native-speaking accents in supermarkets. One of them gleefully told a friend of mine (who worked in a customer facing role and thus couldn't talk back) that she would have to 'leave now'.

When the US election result was announced yesterday, people started dancing in the streets, partied with postal workers driving by in their vans, and shouted with joyful relief from their apartment windows.

I have been told to empathise and coddle the feelings of people whose first response to their victories is to terrorise and hurt others. I've been told I just need to try harder to understand their 'legitimate concerns'. I've been told this for years, until I'm drowning in the icy water of these calls for forgiveness. I think, instead, that it is high time that my political opponents get asked to do the work of understanding my concerns, and feeling a scrap of the collosal amount of empathy that I'm constantly asked to feel for them.