I managed to fantastically screw up at work the other week by forgetting one single thing off a giant checklist. It could have been completely unnoticed apart from a string of ludicrous and unfair coincidences that resulted in shit creek bursting it's banks and cascading, wholesale through my place of employment. Complaints made by people who are legally in the right but morally in the wrong had gone to the highest level and the resultant fall-out, to go back to the earlier point, is like a shit-tsunami. It retreated briefly, luring us all forward to gaze at the fish flapping on the empty sea-bed before crashing back like a huge, smelly disaster film. Entire villages were wiped out by the rolling sea of effluent.
I'm pretty sure that life is a sick game where the idea is to pass on as much blame as possible while avoiding any yourself. If it helps, imagine its like an Al Qaeda children's party where the traditional pass-the-parcel is actually a bomb, and the goal of which is to kill everyone. Also there is no cake. Wait, that's a shit metaphor. A better example is my water bill.
My water bill is split into two invoices which go to make up the full total. The first invoice is for the water I am assumed to use, although god only knows how they work that out. The second is for collection of the water that falls on my house. That's right, I pay for the water that falls on my house. As if that was my fucking fault. It doesn't matter if I own the house or rent the house. All that matters is my geographical relationship to the building, apparently. Am I near it? Yes. Is it raining? Fuck you.
If anything, it's victim blaming. I didn't ask to be rained on. It just happened to me. I did nothing to deserve it, and I don't even like rain. Victim blaming is so endemic in our society it is almost a national pass-time.
 |
| Everyone knows that if you wear a chequered shirt, you're gonna have a bad time. |
It isn't just Mail readers who hate the poor. Anyone can hate people on benefits for no particular reason. But nothing quite encapsulates the blinding, gnashing contempt that humans can have for other humans quite like the Mail comment section. Hate the player, not the game. Blame the people who least deserve it. Sorrel - who became a minor celebrity recently - posted this sound advice.
But wait, it gets better. And when I say it gets better, I mean it gets much, much fucking worse.
Almost the 'trope namer' for Victim Blaming is the attitude that people have towards rape victims. The sheer, blind hatred of wilful ignorance that possesses a person to have a go at someone who has been sexually violated, usually in defence of the perpetrator. The victim instead is then put under intense scrutiny - their clothes, attitudes, social standing, previous sexual experiences and even geographical location are all used by victim-blamers to, well...
Yeah.**
Name that trope.
A drunk girl is raped by two young American High school players. Nothing is said about the victim on national TV reels, which lament the boys loss 'promising careers' etc. Meanwhile, social networking explodes as people not constrained by the threat of a lawsuit start calling her a whore, questioning why she was drunk and the like. Because those are the the big things, right? How did she get drunk? It's kind of important BECAUSE NO IT FUCKING ISN'T.
I don't know what drives a society to become a baying, howling mass of people who are presumably cynical, jaded and powered entirely by blinding hatred. I could take a few guesses, but I'd probably just end up roaming the streets howling like a feral dog and attacking anyone - anyone - on sight.
And right now, I think it'd be their fault.
* This is probably one of their nicer articles. It's the comment section that'll get you.
** Trigger Warning. Also, probably the best argument against gun control I have ever seen. A positive marketing strategy for nuclear holocaust.
