T.M. Shannon

It’s quite the lament to see people stripped of their value by any means or manner. For me, it’s worse when Pro-Lifers forget about the life that follows a stopped abortion – and that’s just the beginning of the indignance that follows.

We’re big on others. Xenophobia has been a core human trait, our tribe is best, that tribe isn’t because they’re that tribe. I’ve heard a little about “skin laws” in Australian Aboriginal culture – who you’re allowed to marry or not.

And the fair skinned have their share of these laws. From my own family, I can’t remember how great great grandfather Tommy is, but he came to Australia via assisted passage in the mid-1800s because it was either Catholic boy who married a Protestant girl or the other way around.

And you didn’t do that sort of thing back then.

I digress. But othering kills us, we are right and moral and just but someone who wants the same hopes and dreams just coming from a poorer country gets turned from an asylee into an invader – like white people haven’t done the same thing since fair skin emerged in the world.

What hurts the most is when it’s religiously driven. If anybody was to know I’m an other myself being queer, suddenly “love your neighbour as you love yourself” gets drowned out by a bunch of shit men wrote before tacking on “I am the LORD.”

Why can’t we love each other? Why are we Pro-Life when we’re just
Pro-Birth, neglecting the greater good because some Purityrant happy-clapper is too busy praising the prosperity gospel and decrying the loss of their non-existent “White identity” for a call to be nice to people?

Why are we Pro-Billionaire, tax cuts for yachts, property turned into a get-rich-quick scheme that has stripped the need for shelter away from the lower classes (I’m one of them being on minimum wage) – forcing us into literal serfdom?

Why are we Pro-White, “All lives matter,” when it is clear only white lives matter when this is said, a smackdown to and a discrediting of Black Lives Matter?

Why are we Pro-Israel, when there’s clear genocide happening. Oh, 6 Million Jews were exterminated? No excuse to jump to straight-up Hitlerism and illegal settlements.

No free passes to Hamas or Hezbollah, but to me all sides need to take a good hard look at themselves and their actions.

I don’t get it. Why do we hate, when a core religious message purported to be from the very mouth of God is cast off and something Paul said that I’ve heard said is grossly mistranslated becomes the “Christian ethos”?

It sucks to be a hoper and a dreamer, who’s gone through some of the worst S.H.I.T. ever and somehow still here, funnily enough practicing forgiveness for people who wronged me just by saying a prayer every Sunday and other chance I get.

It’s horrible to believe even someone I’m opposed to, let’s say Trump, is worth saving if in need, when there’s a lot of “Stomp him until he drowns.”

This othering, this phobia, this hatred, this denial of basic civility, our very humanity, does a grave disservice. Me, I actually learnt, “Love thy neighbour,” in the secular world, and yeah, I’ve made horrible mistakes doing my own othering when it really isn’t what I want to do?

As a dire example, why are we casting a teenage girl aside as a slut because a boy shared nude pictures he talked her into taking, but doing nothing about him betraying her?

Speaking of which, I found teenagers to be the cruelest of the cruel, and it wasn’t fun being bullied, othered, being called a f****t because I was perceived as weak.

Where is the unity? Where is the care for the lesser? Why aren’t we striving for betterment for all instead of praising the market and why having nobody unemployed is bad for the economy and inflation?

Where is the humanity? I don’t know. But I miss it, and it saddens me to see it stomped on more and more because a few have to be better than many, all for some prehistoric tribal reasoning that they’re not us, and we’re not them.

Ooh, this got deep, and so I’ll leave it there.