Sometimes, I forget things. I’ll wake up of a morning, have breakfast and think, “Oh, I should take the rubbish out on my way downstairs,” and then forget. So I come home and continue to forget and go about the next few days remembering and then forgetting. At some point, I’ll open the door, step into the apartment and be welcomed by a distinctly unpleasant smell. Within moments, the rubbish will be sitting in the bin outside, and the windows in the apartment will be thrown open, and I hope that next time, I won’t forget.
There was something of an Incident in early November on facebook. Very few people probably noticed or heard about it, but it shook me. A cousin of mine had posted an innocuous question about a club, which I took upon myself to answer, having previously frequented said club. Another cousin (I have a lot of them) began to poke fun at the first, asking if she or her boyfriend were bi, or gay and did she know it was a gay club she was asking about? These jibes rubbed me the wrong way and I commented on them, stating the underlying feeling made me uncomfortable. The thread quickly turned heated. The second cousin leapt on the attack, questioning my understanding of the situation and chastising me for casting ‘judgement’. The first cousin’s boyfriend chimed in his support, and later threw his own harsh words my way, eventually revealing his disturbingly bigoted perspective. Within a day of the last comment, my cousin had deleted her first status, thereby extinguishing the entire thread.
As much as I would dearly love to tear down every word hurled at me over those few hours that is not the point of this post (the beauty of the internet means I can do that tomorrow!). This post is about forgetting, and my cousin’s actions are merely illustrative. Her deletion of the thread speaks to a desire to forget. More than that, it speaks to a desire to quash further argument from any of the commenters.
So now that we’ve apparently forgotten, what happens? Surely everything will go back to the way it was? Everyone has forgotten about it, so there won’t be any lasting effects. Right?
I cannot speak for anyone else involved, but I know that it hasn’t been quite so easy for me. My trust in several people has been severely diminished, I’ve lost a facebook friend (whether or not this is a bad thing remains to be seen), I am severely dispirited to be shown, once again, that I am related to bigots, and I am left with the feeling that, should I ever indulge in my ‘reasonable skeptic’ side in front of my cousins, I will be put-down and ridiculed until I stop talking (the last lesson, admittedly, has already been ingrained from twenty-three years’ worth of stomping on my voice; I’ve only very recently begun to get it back). Beyond the immediate, I will continue to feel this for a very long time. How am I to act when I next see these cousins? Do we acknowledge what happened, or will we casually avoid the topic? What happens if gay rights come up in conversation when we’re in the same room? Will I ever be able to trust them?
Like the forgotten rubbish sitting in my kitchen, this situation will start to smell. The question becomes: how long will we let it sit there? At what point does the smell become too great for us to bear? There are three choices now: sit and let the fetid stench grow, forever unacknowledged; get as far away as possible, so as to avoid having to deal with the smell; fucking deal with it.
In a dream world, I could sit down and have a calm, rational discussion about the Incident, with everyone present really paying attention to what others say, with minds and hearts open. Sadly, I doubt this will happen. I will be told to ignore it, to get over it, to stop complaining, they didn’t really mean it and come on, they’re your cousins can’t you just forgive them and move on? Well, no, I can’t. I won’t. If we all forgive and forget and move on without any resolution, how will we ever grow? If we never take out the rubbish and throw open the windows, how will we smell fresh air again? And once we remember what fresh air smells like, will we let the rubbish pile up again? Or will we learn?
I know what the fresh air is like, and I will do everything I can to stop the rubbish from piling up in my life.
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