Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Today is #HolocaustMemorialDay. I had the privilege of making a film with three survivors of different genocides on the common features which lead to them. We said ‘never again’ but to no avail pic.twitter.com/alvwDyGKP4

— Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1) January 27, 2019

For the communities of Coonabarabran in New South Wales and her grasslands Gomeroi people, Mary Jane Cain is a revered figure. Cain lived from 1844 to 1929. In the late 1880s, she successfully advocated for Aboriginal land security – a rare concession to an Aboriginal woman at the time. In 1920, she penned a 23-page manuscript detailing her life, her observations of new land owners and their workers, and a list of Gomeroi words.

For the most unfortunate Melbourne residents, unable to afford private air-conditioning or access public heat refuges (promoted as ‘primary heat preparedness’ mechanisms in public health policy), stifling homes became both sites and agents of mortality. The loss of life during that period [Jan 20114] was nothing short of a disaster: mortality increased by 24% with 167 deaths attributed to the heatwave. The high death rate was not an aberration and neither did it create an outcry, even though heatwaves have killed more people in Australia than any other natural disaster.

Likewise, the public domain is a remarkable construction that allows us to define who is or isn’t included in normative narratives. The public domain proclaims certain material as property owned by no one; cultural material in the public domain, theoretically, belongs to everyone. As copyright law enables new content to enter the public domain each year, it’s important to look closely at which voices are amplified in the celebration of open culture. There is no actual public domain. There is no site or territory or designation that reflects an authentic condition of making public.
Rather, it’s a legal status created by those who control access. The institutions that define the public domain—museums, libraries, courts, archives like this one—give (or deny) access to materials that have been legally designated as open and available. But as an institutional construct, the public domain can easily fail to reflect any true nature of “the public;” without careful consideration, access to the public domain ends up repeating and perpetuating, in a highly predictable way, the same oppressive structures that govern society and culture.

muccamukk

That is not always how these situations have ended though. I will fully admit that I took part in the J2 Haiti Fic pile on (and am memorialised by FanLore for doing so). At the time, it seemed really clear cut. It was right after RaceFail; the fic was indeed racist. It was a time when fandom was already talking about how to deal with racism in fandom. The discussion took off. Probably a hundred people wrote meta, including me, picking apart the OP's behaviour, and if we considered at all how the OP felt about it, it was that either a) they had it coming, and/or b) they were less important than the conversation that was happening. There was a feeling that fandom needed to have that conversation, and yeah it probably did, but looking back on it now, I don't think we needed to have it at the expense of some poor schmuck who wrote an offensive RPF fic.

staranise

So part of figuring out how to express this emotion is to think, if someone becomes really concerned by my plight, what kinds of actions do you want to point them towards? This is both something my client can work towards personally, and a quest they can invite other people to join in on. We took the catastrophically huge emotion, "I feel alone all the time and I'm afraid I'll be alone forever," and worked backwards. If someone understood this fear and worked empathetically to allay it, what kinds of actions would we see from them? So my client said: "They'd invite me to things, I'd hang out with them, we'd have friends who did stuff together."
A bite-sized serving of this emotion therefore becomes: "I wish I had friends. I wish I had people to hang out with. I'm lonely here."
And then, instead of leaving it there and leaving your listener totally in charge of fixing your feelings, you tell your listener what actions you are taking to deal with that feeling. This is work they can encourage you in, validating both your loneliness and your effort. They can also, if they want, assist you.