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Jan. 9th, 2015 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
la_rainetteOver the course of the past two days, my Facebook seems to have developed a split personality.
Yesterday I found it painful to follow, mostly because all my French friends were all still reeling from the pain of losing people who, for folks of my generation, were a little like kindly but infuriatingly irreverent uncles - of the kind that you dread inviting to your various celebrations because they'll get riotously drunk and tell inappropriate jokes to the cute, shy nun - while many of my American and Canadian friends were having a pretty normal day - everyone is aware and supportive, don't get me wrong, but they're not as overwhelmed as we are.
Today - well, today I am getting increasingly uncomfortable with my Facebook feed. It's super hard to see that the Front National is already using the Charlie Hebdo shooting to try and garner more votes - not that I didn't expect it, mind. It's super hard to see Third Child, our friend J's son, who used to spend entire summers with us, post about François Hollande needing "to grow balls and step in more forcefully".
My first thought was "Wow - I'm glad he's still too young to vote". And then - and then I remembered that he no longer was. And I wonder what it says about me - as someone who loves and values democracy - that my immediate next thought was "how can I stop him from voting?"* I love democracy, I really do, but uh. Honestly, guys, if you want to vote for Le Pen, I'd rather you stayed home and didn't vote at all.
*Of course, the solution is to convince him to vote for someone else instead. And I'll try, fear not.
Also, I read this (thank you Jae for linking) and I thought I'd share:
I support the right of Charlie Hebdo to be obscene, disrespectful and inflammatory; but I do not need to be obscene, disrespectful or inflammatory to be supportive. The whole point of freedom of expression isn’t for me to use someone else’s mode of expression, it’s the freedom for me to express myself in my own mode of expression.
[...]
There would be no winner in a war between Islam and the rest of the world: it is a war which the world need never fight and should never fight. The response of Muslims and non-Muslims to murder and violence in the streets of Paris must be to step clearly and decisively away from the war that our enemies desire.
The response of the non-radical non-Islamist people of the world to the Charlie Hebdo massacre should be the opposite of radicalism. The best response is not to seek solidarity by joining the dead in their mockery of Islam’s prophet. It is to support the countries, the systems, the freedoms and the values that make Charlie Hebdo’s blasphemous mockery lawful and possible, whatever the result.
Read the entire post here. Thanks tojae for linking me to it.
Yesterday I found it painful to follow, mostly because all my French friends were all still reeling from the pain of losing people who, for folks of my generation, were a little like kindly but infuriatingly irreverent uncles - of the kind that you dread inviting to your various celebrations because they'll get riotously drunk and tell inappropriate jokes to the cute, shy nun - while many of my American and Canadian friends were having a pretty normal day - everyone is aware and supportive, don't get me wrong, but they're not as overwhelmed as we are.
Today - well, today I am getting increasingly uncomfortable with my Facebook feed. It's super hard to see that the Front National is already using the Charlie Hebdo shooting to try and garner more votes - not that I didn't expect it, mind. It's super hard to see Third Child, our friend J's son, who used to spend entire summers with us, post about François Hollande needing "to grow balls and step in more forcefully".
My first thought was "Wow - I'm glad he's still too young to vote". And then - and then I remembered that he no longer was. And I wonder what it says about me - as someone who loves and values democracy - that my immediate next thought was "how can I stop him from voting?"* I love democracy, I really do, but uh. Honestly, guys, if you want to vote for Le Pen, I'd rather you stayed home and didn't vote at all.
*Of course, the solution is to convince him to vote for someone else instead. And I'll try, fear not.
Also, I read this (thank you Jae for linking) and I thought I'd share:
I support the right of Charlie Hebdo to be obscene, disrespectful and inflammatory; but I do not need to be obscene, disrespectful or inflammatory to be supportive. The whole point of freedom of expression isn’t for me to use someone else’s mode of expression, it’s the freedom for me to express myself in my own mode of expression.
[...]
There would be no winner in a war between Islam and the rest of the world: it is a war which the world need never fight and should never fight. The response of Muslims and non-Muslims to murder and violence in the streets of Paris must be to step clearly and decisively away from the war that our enemies desire.
The response of the non-radical non-Islamist people of the world to the Charlie Hebdo massacre should be the opposite of radicalism. The best response is not to seek solidarity by joining the dead in their mockery of Islam’s prophet. It is to support the countries, the systems, the freedoms and the values that make Charlie Hebdo’s blasphemous mockery lawful and possible, whatever the result.
Read the entire post here. Thanks to
jae for linking me to it.
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Date: 2015-01-09 08:02 pm (UTC)Anyway, I'm glad to hear you weren't offended, and that you even saw some value in it. *hug*
-J
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Date: 2015-01-09 08:55 pm (UTC)Also, it's a great piece, it makes a lot of sense and I think I badly needed to read something like that (but yeah, I did not dare post it on my own FB timeline, I confess, because I was afraid I might hurt the feelings of some of my friends - not all of them, but some of them, certainly... and I don't think any of us can take having our feelings hurt in that respect any more this week. So I get where you come from, and thank you for wanting to protect me *hugs*, but I am glad I found it anyways.)
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Date: 2015-01-10 12:40 am (UTC)I had a weird day at work yesterday and today. I was following all the news coverage, but no one at work was talking about it at all. I have no idea if they even knew what was happening. And I didn't know what to post, or if I should post anything at all. On the one hand I'd never heard of Charlie Hebdo, and couldn't have anything pertinent to the situation to say; on the other hand, I don't have to be familiar with the company or know the victims personally in order to feel sorrow and to express sympathy and outrage; on yet another hand, does anyone really need more Americans sticking their noses in and wallowing in the tragedy and pontificating about the ramifications? Maybe we should just shut up and let people talk about it who are actually intimately connected to and affected by it?
(This is why I don't post on DW/LJ anymore, BTW. I have lost the ability to communicate without overthinking every sentence and worrying that it will offend someone.)
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Date: 2015-01-10 04:50 pm (UTC)Yeah - my FB feed was so weird, between pain and outrage for Charlie Hebdo and then recipes, cat pictures, ordinary days for everyone else. It feels surreal, like I'm sleepwalking. But thank you - thank you for the sympathy, thank you for the link. Please come back to DW/LJ? :) I understand what you say, I feel the same way, but I can't communicate on FB the same way I do on DW or LJ and I really to not enjoy tumblr, so I am coming back to DW and LJ and just... I always do my best to not step on people's toe, but if I do, too bad. I need a place where I can be myself