‘It’s always been like this’

I will try to express to you how much I dislike this kind of explanation. Variants of it may be the following: ‘humankind is like this’, ‘the mentality here has always been like this’, ‘people are x,y or z’. I realise that it is often understood that I need to describe and analyse what is going on and what people are saying to me and not take sides. Write it all down, as it was put to you. I confess that sometimes I am an anthropologist who doesn’t shut up. My usually very calm, bordering-on-indifferent attitude to certain people making arguments with which I couldn’t disagree more gets disrupted at times. I lose my temper with some people, and I forget about politeness, and cannot just say to myself, let it go, you need not pay attention to this silliness. I have been trained to be sensitive to the world, due to my job, and the boundaries are permeable. I am involved in this world.I especially dislike when authoritarian males are trying to teach me about this, that or the other do not give me any credit, or think it needs convincing that they are the man for me, … just because they have made up their mind that I am a combination of a.young, b.female, c.foreign, d.blonde. I need to speak up against the cynical views so prevalent here that people have always been thieves, opportunists, and that politicians have always been out to get their own share by means of the office they occupy. I need to disagree with the idea that there have always been differences between people and that this is a good thing in the face of (and entirely ignoring) widening and deepening relative and absolute inequalities in a global economy that continues to be labelled ‘capitalism’. I need to hack at aristocratic pretensions and the ideas that some people are necessarily, by birth, masters or servants. I need to believe that the world is getting readier for meritocracy. I need to disagree with local bureaucrats who tell me bullshit about laws, public office and maps. I need to show a reaction to lies, excuses and lack of good will. I need to scream in the face of biological determinism and ‘it’s in our genes to be like this, that or the other’. I need to speak up against views that assert that men are more violent than women and have always needed, in situations like wars, to rape women. I need to shut out drunkards who interrupt me in my conversations with other people and who patronise me like I know nothing about the world and the language I have been living in for the last six months. I need to speak my mind about the casualness with which is mentioned the following: ‘I do not beat women’. I want a world in which this is impossible to even think. I need to encourage women who ask me whether I am not frightened to be alone, and to walk and live among strangers. I need to at least assert what I think (sometimes), even if I have no power to change any/much of it. Mentalities and people can change very quickly, and I refuse to believe that the people are all bad. I have a lot of faith, though I may lose courage and temper sometimes. This is why I fight.09.04.07