ENVIAR LETRAS
Top 100
Lanzamientos de álbumes
Artistas
Comunidade
Francés
Portuguese
Inglés
Corrección Letra
The Absolute State of the Union
par
The Narcissist Cookbook
Regreso
Letra
For 125 years the statue of Edward Colston stood in the center of Bristol Three decades of attempts to have it removed through official channels resulted in humming and hawing and hand-wringing and ultimately Dead ends In 2014, a poll of locals found that 56% of people wanted it to stay When the system for maintaining our shared public spaces fails And a monument to a proud slave trader is allowed to stand in the center of a town, getting older and grander by the year Sinking his rotten roots deeper and deeper into the ground The people (I would argue) Have a right Even a moral duty To tear it down And to roll it without fanfare into the nearest f**king river And this is exactly what they did On June 7th, 2020, against the explicit wishes of the democratically elected council and the majority of the city This is not, despite what you may think or may have heard, "a complicated issue" White Britain doesn't have the privilege of saying there is a gray area here Not anymore We have been living comfortably in the gray area for hundreds of years And failing to do the bare f**king minimum for the people we have transplanted over here against their will It is hard to not feel more than a little cognitive dissonance when your country tells you that racism is a thing of the distant past While a monument to a professional racist stands towering over a major city with his chin resting lazily in his f**king palms It took me way too long to figure out That equality and fairness Do not always equate to treating everybody exactly the same Or to insisting that groups with competing interests work together to come to a compromise Why should a group, whose primary interest is disempowering white supremacists, be forced to compromise with groups whose sole interest seems to be to impede that progress? I have very little problem, it turns out With saying Group A are allowed to take direct, destructive action, while Groups B through KKK are not when it becomes clear that Group A are right and everybody else is completely f**king wrong And believe me when I tell you That it pains me to say that on some level Because I spent my twenties like many people do Trying, in vain, to piece together a coherent Euclidean worldview that looks the same from every angle Trying to understand where everyone was coming from Arguing that "morality is relative" And that "good and evil are primitive ideas" And that "there is no right and wrong besides the laws we agree to as a collective" and– Blah, blah, blah F**king undergraduate, entry-level, bullsh*t To hear myself today argue that property damage and vigilante justice can be perfectly acceptable means to achieve particular ends (And are, in fact, sometimes the only way to get justice in a system as f**ked up as our's is) Goes against everything I used to believe in The thing is, the young man who would tell you with a straight face, no less that "There is never an excuse for violence or for taking the law into your own hands" Did not realize at the time that that att**ude came from a position of never having to so much as raise his voice to be heard From knowing that almost everyone in a position of power Looked and sounded like him He had never had to try and communicate his experience of being alive to someone who saw him as different and alien His needs had never been anything other than inherently sympathetic and justified And by arguing that people should be able to fight for their rights while in the same breath denying them the right to fight He was more than a product of the system, he was a dedicated defender of it While self-identifying as progressive And liberal And punk Of all things You know At the bottom of everything I think he was threatened By the idea that someone might one day come along and take from him what was never rightfully his to begin with "The steady march of social change is fine, and good, and should be encouraged," he thought As long as he is not caught in the path of it As long as he's not disenfranchised and inconvenienced in any way by it Like if, in the process of trying to have your voice be heard, the architects of your pain brought to justice, you so much as moderately delay my commute to work Let alone ask me to do the emotional labor of recognizing my privileged position within an oppressive power structure God forbid ask me to take some personal responsibility for any of it Then f**k you And f**k what you stand for Which, of course, is a roundabout way of saying "I support your right to protest up until the point where I become unable to ignore it" Which, going further still, is a roundabout way of saying "I don't really respect your right to protest at all" I am getting... Man, I need a f**king drink I am getting way too wrapped up... In the peaceful protest debate (Which I did not intend to) Which, I think, is a large part of why the people in power are addressing that angle So they don't need to... Address the actual reasons... People are... Toppling statues Ask yourself: What personal qualities do we encourage in this society? To clarify, I don't mean: What do we teach our children? To share and be kind I mean: What qualities do we actively reward in reality? The only way we can with... power... and money Dishonesty Exploitation Above all, a pathological lack of empathy These are the traits our society fosters We stop just short of selectively breeding for them And the people who truly embody these values The people most willing to lie or take advantage of others are the ones who rise to the top By virtue of their willingness to seize and protect that power By doing what others will not, they become the people who run our inst**utions The people who plot our trajectories They start our wars and they write our laws And, not coincidentally, these are the people whom we enshrine in history These are the people we erect statues of Quote: "I do not admit that a wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think that the Red Indians had any right to say, 'The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.' They had not the right, nor had they the power." End quote That was Winston Churchill A de facto saint in British lore for his role in the second world war And there is no doubt that Britain, under Churchill's government, played a central part in defeating Hitler and the Nazi regime Who were directly responsible for the deaths of 18 million people Compared to... I don't know The four million Bengalis Churchill killed by taking their food away during a famine A people he said he (and I quote) "hated" And blamed their slow, agonizing deaths on them "breeding like rabbits" He was a man who boasted of personally killing "savages" in the Sudan And he got mad at other for their "squeamishness" when they objected to his suggestions that they "shell uncivilized tribes" (his words, not mine) with poison gas And remember that the others objected Those were not universally held beliefs at the time His own secretary of state for India described his att**ude as "not quite sane" And that he couldn't see much difference between Churchill's outlook and Hitler's He couldn't see much difference between Churchill's outlook And Hitler's When talk of removing his statue was brought up, his defenders had the gall to say: "Nobody is 100% pure" As if "Wasn't a literal white supremacist" is an unrealistic benchmark to hold our heroes to And this (If you don't get it by now) Is just one of the ten thousand reasons people are saying that black lives matter Because, for decades upon decades, the response to criticism of this f**king cretin Who was voted by our country to be the greatest Briton Was to be told, with a patronizing pat on the head, that to take his statue down would risk us forgetting our history As if the records of the British Empire's atrocities weren't bundled into crates at the empire's end and sent to the bottom of the sea That it would be akin to "photoshopping out our blemishes" As if anyone has ever built a statue to someone as a monument to a single one of their misdeeds As if Winston Churchill And Edward Colston And Cecil Rodes And John Mitchell And Oliver Cromwell And Horatio Nelson And the Roberts Milligan Clive And Baden-Powell Were all uniquely complicated men who represented the very best of what it means to be British And so I say If you really don't think that we should take these statues down If you are truly not in the least bit ashamed of these men and what they stood for You should really take a moment and ask yourself why What does that say about you? And if the answer you get from your conscience Is that these men deserve the symbolic power we have bestowed upon them Then why not double down And put busts of these great Britons up in every town center Their portraits Hanging over every shrinking Dimly lit Gray family dinner As we limp arthritically into our country's next chapter Stamp their names and the names of every wealthy descendant of every proud British slave owner And slave trader And war criminal And concentration camp owner On every street sign and bank note and home office letter To do otherwise, you see, would be to allow us to forget Who we are Where we came from That this This Is the foundation On which we built Our shameless nation This (In the most literal sense of the phrase) Is us
videoclip
Tu nombre será publicado. Deje los campos en blanco para permanecer en el anonimato.
Enviar
Modal title
×
Insertar medios
Video URL?
(YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, DailyMotion, Soundcloud)
×
Recuérdame
Contraseña perdida
Conectarte
Registrarse