However, my recent news is based at university.
Being a university, it is a hotbed of any sort of dissension or political action. It's what idealistic students do! But I have to wonder at a particular inequality that has reared its ugly head.
I can sign a petition or join a club or show my support for almost anything and by and large people respect your decision. They may not like your choice, but accept that you made that choice. You can sign up as a member of a conservative political party, cop shit from the liberal followers and vice versa. Or you can align with the anarchists, and cop shit from both.
Every now and then they have club/society open days, one particular display caught my attention. It is was run by the Gay and Lesbian society and detailed some of the hardships they had faced on campus.
I signed their petition. Then I got the questioning from onlookers.
This is my point. Why am I getting the third degree from my peers for wanting to help my peers? The reasons I was given were
"Well, you aren't gay"
And? So the fuck what?
"You don't know anyone who is gay"
Correction, I don't know anyone who has told me. And quite frankly, it's not my business.
"You have no connection to anything homosexual"
There were petitions for all sorts of stuff there, saving trees I've never seen, repealing a tax I've never paid, or fund-raising for a lecture I will not attend. But I'll sign and chip in a few bucks, despite not having a connection.
Why the double standard? Why can't I show support for a group of people, any group of people on the simple grounds that they are a group of people? In this particular case, people with documented malfeasance against parts of the university.
This whole episode pissed me off and not I'm-fed-up-with-thesis pissed off. Pissed off because there seems to be something endemic at that place, something that is there because that is the way it is. More to the point, some injustice which I have been complicit in by not speaking up when I
I have been wracking my brain trying to think of just why this hit a nerve with so many people. What I cannot grapple with is the finality of each of the statements by onlookers. "You are not gay", that fucking utterance raises yet more questions. You know what? I dislike reggae music, but I signed the reggae appreciation society's petition to get a club room.
