This afternoon I gave up on fettling the Rusty Old Wreck for a while and took a walk down to the church I was baptised in rather a long time ago. It's a typical English village church, not a very big one though and I don't think Professor Pevsner spent too long on it.
On a grey November afternoon I had it to myself. It's a place I've taken refuge in before, being very quiet and calm, at times I've needed it as a bit of an escape. As a lapsed Harvest Festival Anglican I can't claim any profound religious experience from it but it's served its community's spiritual needs for a very long time and I guess my composing of inner turmoil comes under that heading. I may not attend the services but I've done my fair share of building maintenance and I wired in the electric organ when they got it.
My thoughts were on today's transgender day of remembrance. Knowing that the thought of a trans-person in their church would wind up some of the more traditional among the congregation (though not the vicar, she's pretty sound) I thought in for a penny, in for a pound, and lit a candle.
I don't know how long I sat there in the front pew. I know I ended up feeling pretty angry at the world for the way it allows so many people to be sacrificed. Angry and cold, village churches aren't heated on non-service days.
Later on as the light started going I was walking my mother's dog. I bumped into our neighbour, a farmer's wife. She was annoyed that some of her fences had been altered by the local hunt, part of a low-level war that's been simmering in the countryside for a decade or more between the local residents and an entity that acts as a law unto itself.
It struck me that the huntsmen saw their deeds - criminal damage in the eyes of the law - as perfectly excusable, they'd done nothing wrong. You can do anything when you don't think you've done anything wrong.
How can it happen that so many people apparently don't see anything wrong in violence towards transgendered people?
"How can it happen that so many people apparently don't see anything wrong in violence towards transgendered people?"
ReplyDeleteI think it's because they see such people as being somehow defective.
Jenny, it's been such a long time since this lapsed Episcopalian served at the alter as a teenage acolyte, yet there is still something very calming about the inside of an empty chapel.
ReplyDeleteAs for the sacrifices tolerated by an uncaring world.......well, I guess it's up to us to keep trying to get them to care, but it's an uphill battle. The world abounds with vile uncaring, selfish and self-righteous people of all stripes.
Your neighbors have huntsmen carelessly breaking down their fences, I have obnoxious neighboring teenagers, driving off the gravel roads of our subdivision, and running ruts in the soft grassy turf of the right of ways, with their ATV's, and we here on Blogger have have one of our own, condescendingly referring to some of us as "Queens" and "chicks with dicks". Civility isn't just written into our DNA, it's a reflection of our upbringing. Your upbringing appears to be just fine. :-)
Melissa XX
You have a good heart, Jenny!
It's all about 'othering', I suppose. I try to reassure myself by reflecting, not that so many people are divisive, but that I am pleasantly surprised by how many are accepting, if clueless. Hunts, though? *ptui* -how very dare they?
ReplyDelete...you probably know Little Gidding, but still-
ReplyDeleteYou are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
@ Dru
ReplyDeleteDru, you are a beautiful human being! Sniff!
Melissa XOXO
It's called 'Sin' Jenny. That's the reason people are as they are. I could go on here but it would swamp your blog! Love
ReplyDeleteShirley anne xxx
Thanks everyone. Anger in check. When we are visible and ubiquitous enough to no longer be different perhaps that list on the TDOR website will be a lot shorter.
ReplyDeleteThe hunt? I too could go on forever on that front. They weren't destroying fences, they were lowering them to make them easier to jump - onto land they've been banned from. Their own worst enemy, those people, Mr. Cameron has picked some very strange bedfellows.
I think many people lead damagingly unnecessarily stressful lives trying to conform to unrealistic ideals. So maybe the pain of "failing" and the frustration of not being able, or "allowed", to tackle the source of their pain results in some of them being unjustly, blindly vindictive towards others. Maybe directed at foxes in some cases.
ReplyDelete