#i just don't know if a baby and bathwater approach is helpful here

[tallshipandstar]

Why are people still supporting weapo?

Anon, I have started answering this over and over but I never get very far, partly because I spent far too much of January in the office with my stress and anxiety running at about an eleven out of ten for work related reasons and had to disengage for my own sanity, and also because I don’t want to come across as though I’m dismissing other people’s concerns or feelings or trying to talk over other people.

I also can’t talk for ‘people’, only myself.

And for me, I get where people are coming from but where I get stuck is on context. We’re talking about an immensely messed up system here and that’s not news to anyone. We’ve known that for years. But then what becomes of the people who grew up in that system, with a single minded focus, living life in the ‘bubble’?

I don’t intend that to be an excuse for abuse or deliberate cruelty or anything like that. i’m talking about the ‘ordinary’ (for lack of a better term) people who are just trying to get through life as best they can.

But there’s a lack of perspective that comes from being enmeshed in a system. How many people do you know, for example, in a toxic work environment who can’t see that fact, and sometimes don’t realize until years after? When it’s all you know and it’s normalized, how do you know when something’s wrong and needs to be fixed? That’s a legitimate question, at least in my head. It’s easy enough to say ‘learn better’ or ‘do better’ but how do you even know to start? Or where to start? I was basically raised by the internet. I read a lot and I read fast and I remember the long slow painful process of having to confront some of my own biases and the ideas I’d grown up with, and I didn’t have to rely on those ideas to make my lifelong dreams come true. I didn’t go looking for it, I stumbled across it. if you don’t have that and you don’t have anyone to tell you, how do you know?

I don’t know where to find the balance between meeting people where they’re at and having an expectation that they can do better. I definitely think both is possible, but I’m not sure we can do that by assuming that everyone comes to the starting line of this particular marathon with the same knowledge and experience and the same emotions. it’s like we have people who were prepared for the start gun to go off and are a few hundred metres down the course, and people who are still getting their heads around the idea that there even is a race, let alone with figuring out how they’re going to run the damn thing. Especially if this is the first real serious challenge to their worldview.

I’m also not convinced that anyone owes us, as a fandom, any kind of insight into what’s going on for them. Maybe they’re burying their heads in the sand or maybe they’re in that re-evaluating stage that comes when you find out that someone you knew and liked and trusted is actually a child sex abuser. (BTDT. 19 years on I still remember the world-falling-away feeling of it, and he wasn’t a friend but a respected adult in my life, and he also wasn’t dead, and he also admitted it very early on. And it was still hard to readjust and reassess and wonder if I’d missed something I should have seen and what to do with all the good memories.) 

it’s early. They’ve been in this world since they were small children. I can’t expect them to bring the same kind of perspective to the table that I have. (Which includes the knowledge that anyone, no matter how much I like them, could be an abuser. At an old job I had to give ‘evidence’ in an abuse investigation against a co-worker (unexplained bruising on a non-verbal child). I wanted to swear that he didn’t do it or at least not intentionally, that he would never hurt a child. My gut and my heart said that was the case. My brain said there was a 0.1% chance he did, and so there was no way I could definitely say “there’s no way he did that on purpose.”)

I guess, in the end, in the years I’ve been following them I haven’t seen anything that makes me say they don’t deserve to be liked or appreciated or admired for what they bring to the table. Obviously they have a lot of their own privilege and they live in a bubble and maybe that means there’s a lot missing. But I can’t assume they’re not thinking or processing or reassessing just because they’re not doing it publicly. 

Anon, this is probably tl;dr and I don’t blame you if you didn’t read it. But I guess I just don’t want to put the idea out there that I haven’t thought about this or that I’m not still thinking about it. If you, or anyone else, wants to come off anon (or stay on anon, whatever) and talk about it, go for it. I am about to go to bed (maybe) and I have to work tomorrow, but I’ll get back to you when I can.