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Yesterday was an incredibly difficult, exhausting day.
Today, I am tired tired tired and cannot find any spoons at all. (Metaphorical spoons. I ate my cereal with a spoon I found by looking in the cutlery drawer.)
Although I have already read several Star Trek fanfics and felt a happy, warm glow like coming home.
Idle news references, to things that are not new: Afghanistan's only pig is in quarantine. The thing that really got me in the article, though, was a recap of how Kabul Zoo suffered during the 1992-4 civil war, including this bit:
One fighter climbed into the lion enclosure but was immediately killed by Marjan, the zoo's most famous inhabitant. The man's brother returned the next day and lobbed a hand grenade at the lion leaving him toothless and blind.
Dammit, it is my firm belief that anyone who climbs into a zoo enclosure and gets attacked by the occupant(s) deserves exactly what they got. Your brother got mauled by a lion in a zoo enclosure? Your brother was an idiot, case closed.
I remember hearing about people complaining after a man was mauled by a lion in a zoo in a non-civil-war-related situation. People protested that there should be some kind of security system to prevent this. (Googling to try and find the story itself, I find many references to people getting killed in lion enclosures in zoos. In a number of cases, the lions seem to get killed. I disapprove of this.)
Clearly, the lion enclosures should be fenced off. Signs would help, but fences need to be there in case people can't read. And then, for proper security, some kind of large, dangerous animal could be put inside to guard against intruders.
OH WAIT.
Here's one: Judson Brown, a seasonal maintenance worker at the zoo, was walking near the lion's cage shortly after 4 P.M. when the lion grabbed his right hand and pulled him into the cage up to his shoulder, according to Peter French, first deputy parks commissioner.
The unidentified visitor distracted the lion by banging his belt on the cage while Mr. Brown freed his arm, Mr. French said.
Dude, you were clearly too close to the cage, or something. Do not disrespect the lion's personal space and will to hurt you.
Also, "cage"? They still keep large animals in cages? My city's zoo keeps large animals in habitats. Spacious enclosures, designed to be as like the animal's natural environment as possible. On the one hand, sometimes it's hard to see the animals, if they're chilling out somewhere that doesn't have a clear line of sight for spectators. On the other hand, the animals are relaxed and happy. (This is important, because the Perth Zoo is also heavily involved in endangered species breeding programs, and it's helpful to keep the animals in a good mood so they'll have more sex and babies.)
The importance of the conditions animals are kept in was driven home to me at Perth Zoo, actually - years ago now, they had a cheetah which had, previously, been kept in a cage. The cheetah was neurotic and broken - its enclosure was a large area, landscaped to be a home for a cheetah... and the cheetah spent its time at the six-foot-wide chain-link gate at the back, pacing, turning in a way that looked almost convulsive, back and forth along those six feet of chain. It didn't know how to deal with space to roam and wander. (I think it recovered a little before it died, but it did die, and did not live as long as Perth Zoo's big cats often do.)
In contrast, other big cats at the Zoo have and seem to enjoy their space - they sleep, they play, they roam the area. Sometimes they prowl at the windows through which people can see them, eyeing the humans in a leisurely way if they feel like it - if they don't, they go and sleep among the bushes, or do whatever else it is they do where we can't see them.
Another for-humans advantage of this: no, seriously, you can actually understand why bright stripes are nonetheless camouflage on tigers.
The most awesome time to visit: when they have cubs. Tiger cubs are adorable, fierce kittens. They're all RAWR I AM A BIG HUGE FIERCE TIGER FEEEAAAR ME OH HEY YOU HAVE A TAIL *POUNCE* on their littermates/mother, it's the cutest thing ever. (Full grown tigers are not cute. Also, I find tiger cubs more cute chewing on other tigers - I have a feeling that if they were chewing on my thumb, it would hurt a lot more than when an actual kitten does it.)
Anyway, my basic point is: If you get eaten by a zoo animal because you climbed into its home for some kind of lark, the fault is yours, not the animal's.
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This afternoon I watched Miss Congeniality and Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous. (I have them both on DVD - don't judge me, they are actually both really good movies.) (Even if Miss Congeniality 2 is the gayest "straight" movie ever - to the extent that my mother, on viewing it with me, observed: "So, the romantic subplot in this one is with her female partner, right?") I recommend this as a way to pass an afternoon when feeling completely incapable of doing anything more strenuous than collapsing.
My spoon tally is currently heavily negative, and I'm trying to regenerate some.
Yesterday was a very long, exhausting day, much of which I spent crying. Including during my session with my psychologist, very little of which I spent not crying. I've been crying quite a bit lately - it's more than slightly annoying. My brother-out-law argues that it's a sign I'm getting better. I maintain that when I was more emotionally damaged I at least didn't blub all the time...
One highlight was stopping by my preferred music shop, to get my mother's guitar serviced. As it turns out, however, the guitar is actually in very good shape - the machine heads just needed oiling, and since conditioning the fretboard a) is easy and b) requires removing the strings, that's being left aside for now. They're out of fretboard conditioner, but I'm going to get some when they get it in, and condition the fretboard next time I replace the strings.
One of the Guitar Dudes oiled the machine heads, worked them into shape, tuned the guitar to check it out, gave me recommendations for how to deal with the fretboard, etc... all for the hefty price of nothing at all.
This is why that (Musgroves Music on Hay Street, for Perthites) is my preferred guitar shop - the guys who work there are kind of awesome. The service is excellent, and they're pretty patient with foolish questions. They do sell some other instruments besides guitars, but they mostly have guitars, and I sigh happily every time I go in there.
When I get my settlement for lost everything since the accident, I have a short list of things I would have bought by now had I been able to earn money, and haven't. Aside from repaying certain people a few grand here and there, the rest I conserve to live on while I finish recovering.
The list is:
1) Electric guitar
2) Full-size keyboard (because I want to learn piano-type skills as well, including learning to read music properly; I considered a digital piano, but they're a lot more expensive, and also very bulky; a keyboard I can prop up in a corner)
3) Digital SLR (maybe - not fully decided)
And that's all. Not that those items aren't quite pricey, mind you; a keyboard will cost me a few hundred dollars, the guitar will quite possibly cost a couple of thousand, and digital SLRs are really quite expensive.
But the thing is: if I'd been working all this time, if my life hadn't fallen apart when I got hit by a car, I would have these things. And, too, while they're expensive to buy, they're things that will, barring major accidents, last me many years of satisfaction and joy. Keyboards can last a really long time, and guitars, if cared for, last decades upon decades.
While at the guitar shop, wandering around admiring instruments while the nice man worked over Mum's guitar, I stopped at a display of violins - with, among them, one viola.
Me, to brother-out-law: "Look, Chas! It's a viola!"
Chas: "Bad Sami."
Me: "You're right... it knows it's a viola, it's cruel to point it out." Pause. "If you're driving down the road and see a violist and a conductor, which one do you hit first?"
Chas: "... I don't know."
Me: "The conductor. Business before pleasure."
More random music jokes:
Q: What's the difference between a viola and a trampoline?
A: You take your shoes off to jump on a trampoline.
Q: What's the definition of "perfect pitch"?
A: Throwing a viola into a dumpster without hitting the rim.
Q: Why do violists stand outside houses for a long time?
A: They can't find the key and they don't know when to come in.
Q: Why is a bassoon better than an oboe?
A: The bassoon burns longer.
Q: What's a burning oboe good for?
A: Setting a bassoon on fire.
Yes, I do know some guitarist jokes. No, I'm not telling them, because I want to be a guitarist.
That said, if I'm ever again physically capable of bowing an instrument, I also want to learn to play the cello, because it's one of my all-time favourite instruments to listen to.
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So here's a thing I periodically tell people:
Once upon a time, a boy was born in Austria, in a town called Altmuenster. His father was a night-watchman. The boy didn't like his father, but that wasn't his whole world, and in any case his father died when he was eight; the boy played the zither, and gave zither lessons, and as a teenager became an apprentice weaver. He was a master weaver by the age of 23, but he feared this wasn't the best career for him, for his health, for his future.
So, he joined the police force, because he was a very moral boy, who had written very good essays about morality in school. He liked the cleanliness and security the Austrian police uniform offered, he later said. His name, by the way, was Franz.
Seven years later, in 1938, the Anschluss happened, and Germany and Austria were united. Things got difficult for a lot of people - the new government was suspicious and authoritarian, and many people were arrested or otherwise removed from the police force. Franz got promoted rapidly. He was married by now, with young children, and he couldn't possibly let himself be arrested, made to disappear, leaving his wife and children destitute - or maybe even arrested with him. So as time went on, he did some things he didn't like very much, like sign documents disavowing any affiliation with the Catholic Church.
After all, it's not such a big thing, is it? And if he didn't... well. That would be suicide. Not just for himself - he might as well kill his own children himself, because it would be a cleaner death. Some very nasty men, called the Gestapo, would take his wife and children too, and they might get very badly hurt. So badly hurt his little children, who he loved more than anything, would die screaming if he said no to what they asked.
In 1940, a very important man called Heinrich Himmler gave an order to put Franz in charge of something called the T-4 Euthenasia Program.
Now, Aktion T4, as it was called, was killing people. Franz knew that. But you see, it still wasn't such a very big thing - the people were examined very carefully by doctors, and the only people killed were incurably, deathly ill, or insane, and suffering - they were mercy killings. It was practically a kindness, better for everyone. And still, if he said no, terrible things would happen to his children, so obviously it would be silly to refuse - after all, it was watched over by doctors, and these people were suffering terribly, and if he didn't do it, someone else would, and they might do it badly and things would get worse.
But as it turned out, things weren't quite happening the way they were supposed to happen. Some of the doctors turned out not to be examining people very closely at all. And they started including children. And some of the conditions that got people killed weren't really bad at all, like, for example, "being half-Jewish".
It had all crept up on him so suddenly, and this was what Mister Hitler, who was in charge now, had said should happen, and everyone was agreed that Mister Hitler was in charge, and everyone said how wonderful Mister Hitler was, so what if Franz was wrong, and these people really were sick? It wouldn't be fair to risk his children's lives if he was wrong anyway, would it?
As it turned out, he didn't have to worry about that any more, because Aktion T4 was winding down, and Franz was sent away to a new place. It was a supply camp for the Army, called Sobibor, and he had a very important job there. He was in charge, and he even had his wife and little children nearby, where he could see them, and where the Gestapo knew exactly where they were, which didn't have to be a problem - so long as Franz did everything he was told, his wife and children would be safe.
If he didn't...
Anyway, one day he found a gas chamber hidden in the woods. And his boss, Mister Globocnik, told him that if the Jews who were there to work for them didn't work hard enough, he should kill them off and Globocnik would send him new ones. Franz's wife heard some rumours about what was happening, and asked him questions. Franz told her: "You know this is a service matter and I can’t discuss it. All I can tell you, and you must believe me: whatever is wrong—I have nothing to do with it."
While he was in charge of Sobibor, about 100,000 Jews are thought to have died there.
Not long after that, he was sent to a new place again. This place was called Treblinka. Franz didn't have any doubts any more about what was happening, because it was all around him - he got used to it. He started thinking of the Jewish prisoners as cargo, alive or dead - there were so many of them, but they didn't stay, they just got processed through. It was like a factory, but all it produced was smoke from burning bodies.
He later admitted to the deaths of 900,000 people at Treblinka.
But he didn't admit to feeling guilty about it. He was doing his duty, these were his orders.
Of course, he was also drunk pretty much all the time, at Treblinka. He hadn't been a drinking man before, at all, but now he drank heavily and constantly. It's possible he didn't like himself very much for some reason.
After the war ended, he ran away. Some people from the Vatican helped him get away. Franz moved to Syria, then Brazil, and got a job at a Volkswagen factory under his own name.
An arrest warrant was issued for him in 1961. Franz Stangl was arrested in 1967, and convicted of the killings of 900,000 people. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but died less than a year later.
In 1970, Gitta Sereny interviewed him extensively. In 1974 her book, Into That Darkness, was published, and I wish more people would read it. She traces - with more depth and detail than I have, by far - the gradual process by which Stangl became a wholly amoral being, capable of doing things that he himself would have found unthinkable a decade earlier. Though she wants to be critical, she acknowledges that it is difficult to decide for someone else the point at which they should have sacrificed their own lives, and the lives of their families, for a principle. Knowing, too, that such a sacrifice won't prevent anything, not really, not on its own.
This was the evil of Hitler, and Himmler, and Goebbels - not that they were evil men, though they were, but that by their work they could make other men do evil too.
It's why it's dangerous to think that evil acts only can be done by Evil People. The Ku Klux Klan are evil people, the Nazis were evil people - but I'm not an evil person, my friends and neighbours aren't evil people, so the things we do certainly can't be part of something that's hurting people really a lot. That would make us evil people, which we're totally not, so what we're doing can't be that bad.
Except when it is. Except when the oh-so-sweet Ingalls family are stealing land, killing the people it should belong to, causing great harm. Except when the well-meaning missionaries are wiping out a culture, a language, destroying families. Except when a quarter of a million East Timorese people are dying because intervening against the Indonesian occupation is too hard. Except when we're letting it slide when the government is leaving people locked in tiny cages at Guantanemo Bay, when those people are getting tortured, because we want to feel safe no matter how much our illusion of safety comes at the price of other people's blood and pain. Except when the government is locking families in a "detention centre" that's really a prison, if prisons were allowed to be that terrible, for years and years and years, until they riot and sew their mouths shut and scream in their powerless anger, because we don't want to have to make them deal with all those refugees. Except, except, except.
We have met the enemy. They are Us.
We can choose where we stand. We can choose where we fight. But if we don't remember that the choice is always there, that good people do bad things, then we won't remember that sometimes, we can do harm by default.
Nobody who's going to read this has overseen the deaths of a million human beings. Has stood amid pits of human corpses and thought of them as trash that needs to be disposed of. Nobody has fallen as far as Franz Stangl fell.
But if you think you couldn't fall that far, you're kidding yourself. It could happen - the little compromises, the rationalisations, the tiny steps that are never worth the major sacrifice - that could be you, unless you remember to think.
And that good people do bad things.
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I just came across someone complaining about the Racism 101 comm on LJ being "moderated by white women".
Same person complains about the universality with which non-white folks are granted superior authority in matters of race, by the way.
The thing is this:
Racism 101 is basic shit. That's the whole point. You do not need Authentic Non-White People to run it, to give their Brown Seal of Approval to things. Moreover, expecting non-white people to busy themselves with watching over the education of clueless white people is dear God what is wrong with you people anyway?
Think of it like this: a non-white person has a Ph.D. in Racism And Associated Crap. They may also, in fact, be wrong about some things. They may, in fact, be a fucking moron who needs to be smacked in the head with a chair. However, the discussion of their stupid-ass wrongness is not one a high schooler who's read, like, one primer on Racism And Associated Crap is going to be able to enter without being annoying and even more wrong. Odds are that if you think they're stupid and wrong, you just don't understand what they're talking about.
A Clueless White Person is someone who's in, like, year ten. Thinks they know everything, actually knows jack. If this were science, we're talking about someone who may possibly have a decent understanding of Newtonian physics and elementary geometry, but thinks relativity is e = mc2 because that's the Einstein thing, right?
Racism 101 does not need people with a Ph.D. in Racism And Associated Crap. It needs high school teachers. People who can teach Newtonian physics and don't find it aggravatingly basic and a painfully reductionist approximation of reality. This is the kind of crap that Somewhat Clueful White People can handle. And should.
Non-white people can get involved if they choose. Some people do teach high school even though they have a Ph.D. Sometimes because that's what they really want to do. But expecting Racism 101 to be taught by non-white people so you can have a more Authentic Experience in your Very Special Learning is, in fact, a branch of fail all its own.
Non-white people/people of colour are not required to teach you. They have no obligation or reason to hold your hand and walk you gently through the mists of your own ignorance to the bright sunny dawn of Clue. And you are probably the five hundredth person to ask them to do so.
If I'm getting irritated by the recurring cycle of "Teach me! Teach me! YOU have to explain stuff to me or it's YOUR FAULT if I'M RACIST", it is way, way past the point of seriously uncool.Current Mood:  grumpy
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