Statues
Ah.
Another day another reason to despise the world.
The news these past few weeks has not been fun watching, there have been a lot less stories about baby pandas being born and a lot more about deadly pandemics and racists. But as the war on racism wages on I wanted to talk about something more positive than the usual police brutality.
Statues.
Now, I’m not exactly bursting with national pride, if I was from somewhere like Sweden where all the men are 7 foot tall and the women 6’7” maybe I would have more to be proud of but to put it bluntly I don’t like Britain. The weather’s crap, it’s run by nob heads who all went to the same two schools and our most iconic bits of culture (tea and curry) we stole from Asia. My mother is from Ireland and I’d much rather say I’m from that rain-soaked, half-empty, potato patch than this sorry excuse for a world leader. Yet, since the protests have made there way over here from America, I have felt a tiny glowing warmth of pride in my pasty English chest.
As of me writing this no one in Britain has been killed in a protest and while there have been some injuries and arrests for the most part the police have done the smart thing and not started any riots. I think it is brilliant that so many people went out to show their support and fight for change without getting hurt. Of course, the pinnacle was the tearing down of the statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader who threw enough money at Bristol before he died in 1721 they felt obliged to stick a fat metal version of him on a plinth. The video of the feat being performed is enough to warm anyone’s heart and shows that even though we all have our differences we can all still get together to throw a big, bronze racist into a river. On the other side of the coin the only people to have incited violence have been the right-wing anti-anti-racist protestors (otherwise known as racists) who banded together to protect statues from being vandalised. Now this sounds like a bad thing but it in fact delights me even more than Colston’s underwater adventure because it demonstrates how stupid racists are. There were reports of the protesters “defending” Winston Churchill’s statue throwing up Nazi salutes which is ironic in a way so obvious that only a football hooligan would miss it.
What I love about these far-right protestors is that they represented the absolute worst parts of British culture, our terrible ideas of manhood and manliness and our perverse sense of national pride and self-centredness that refuses to acknowledge our country’s part in ruining the lives of people in almost every other country on the face of the planet, little bundles of racism, toxic masculinity and Rule Britannia tied up with bows of male pattern baldness who run around bricking police officers and sieg heil-ing a statue all in the name of freedom. The reason I love them so much is because they are so awful that it’s easy to know which side of history is the right one (whichever side they aren’t on). But to me they also represent a glimmer of hope because these men weren’t born like this, believe it or not while many babies are born bald none are born wearing stone island jumpers or swastika armbands, they were taught to hate which means, when they eventually die (which with their alcohol consumption will be sooner rather than later), there doesn’t have to be any more like them because we can teach people not to hate. And then in 50 years we’ll look back at those blokes trying to fish a statue out a river with their bare hands and just shrug as we try to explain to our children why they thought that would work.
Alright that’s all for this one, I hope you are all doing well and maintaining social distancing and I’d just like to say, if there are any football hooligans reading this… SIKE we all know football hooligans can’t read!
No but seriously, if you found anything I said in here offensive please let me know and don’t glass me in the face.
