(Read my announcement post if you want an explanation on what we’re doing here.)
Sadly, the unveiling of the first Weekly Defrost comes alongside distressing news. If you don’t want to read about violent homophobia and rhetoric around hurting children, skip to the pink horizontal line down below. If you would like to read the original story, here it is.
This is awful and a sign of how little things can progress. Sixty years ago, a gay man was murdered in Hagley Park, where I enjoyed a picnic with an openly queer friend the other month. Today, Christchurchers are choosing to prepare premeditated violent assaults and humiliations against other Christchurchers for that same queerness.
One of the core precepts of violence is how incredibly dangerous and unpredictable it is. You hit somebody’s head wrong, somebody falls and hits the ground hard, or you attack somebody with a health condition you’re oblivious to, and their life of however many days and months and years can be over in seconds just like that, and you can never bring them back. We are mere luck away from more gay men murdered in our parks.
While I reserve concerns about giving agitators attention, I feel aggravated at the vanishing of our leaders from the rainbow cause since some of them legalised gay marriage and others voted against. There has been a surprising and concerning rise across the West that at first I wanted to dismiss but which can no longer be ignored: the rise of fear and loathing on social media about the rainbow community, particularly targeted around gender.
Many people have gone down rabbit holes for years and years about how people like me are all engaged in a grand conspiracy to hurt and traumatise children. Layer that on top of all the hates and fears that existed the day the gay marriage vote went through and did not magically disappear on the spot, and we can’t sit idly by and expect everything to work out.
This isn't to say that every teenager dressing in black and ambushing somebody looking for human connection is chiefly motivated by an avid following of JK Rowling’s tweets. Instead, it's about the social infrastructure that has to exist behind such an act. To do that, you probably need parents and teachers who never raised you to respect and appreciate rainbow people, you most likely need friends who don't care to stick up against homophobia around you, and you definitely need a large audience who, when you share your own attack on social media, will watch and share instead of tossing the phone away in disgust and thinking about going to the cops.
And you need politicians and other community leaders to let all this happen on their watch. Christchurch City Council can’t do a ton beyond trying to increase lighting in parks and, sure, give Claude his rainbow crossing. It’s a symbolic gesture and we need substance, but why not? I am amenable to the cost argument and don’t want it to be used for pinkwashing purposes, but I am suspicious that cost is where all the counterarguments are coming from.
It'll mean a lot to closeted people who aren't out - relatively well off and educated people who get into culture wars about how rainbow people have nothing to worry about forget that many households still aren’t accepting and that young people surrounded by bigotry often aren’t able to see or engage with pockets of total tolerance blissfully unaware that anywhere else could be anything but. The crossing will provide a rallying point for community leaders to voice support and an everyday reminder to people moving nearby that we’re here too.
Substantive action must come from our politicians who have the tools to address crime and the platform to shape the national conversation. Violent crime is always difficult to knock down and addressing violent hate crimes should be regarded both as a top priority and as a low-hanging fruit. This is because "generic" violent crime, e.g if we consider somebody choosing to beat somebody else up in Hagley to mug them or simply because they were spoiling for a fight, is a) often motivated as a means to acquire something, most commonly money or valuables but also sometimes gang status, and b) can fall on anybody semi-randomly. Rising crime contributes to rising fear in communities and I don’t want to downplay that insecurity, nor the trauma and harm violent criminals inflict on their victims, but that fear is dispersed and not only often down to the individual, but frequently held by older people in the safest suburbs who realistically have very little to fear.
Violent hate crimes, on the other hand, raises two additional concerns. One, nothing can possibly be gained by it: the motive is not calculating or spontaneous greed, like cash for drugs, it's motivated by hate and the target selected accordingly. (Sometimes this leads to weird “spillover” hatred, like Sikhs being attacked by Islamaphobes or straight effeminate men taking the hits of homophobes, too.) Two, that means that that community has a specific fear to identify there: that they will be targeted for who they are.
The corollary is that an incentive is created for all members of that community to hide who they are (e.g no longer wearing religious headgear like kippahs or pagris), suffering an ongoing loss to quality of life and self-actualisation from becoming the bigots’ accomplices in their own suppression. This logic can of course apply to fear from regular crime, like women lacking the freedom to go out alone at night, and that absolutely deserves addressing too - indeed, we could probably stand to apply the logic of hate crime more often to the mistreatment of women, who continue to hover in a strange social category in the discourse around vulnerable groups. Yet it's striking how uniquely hate crimes go beyond individuals terribly injuring other individuals, towards people who typically aren't invested in wider causes nonetheless becoming footsoldiers in the war on an entire class of people, like gays or ethnic minorities.
This is why violent hate crime is low hanging fruit to address. Dealing with violent crime is always an enormous challenge, because wherever there are people and particularly amplified by deep-rooted causes like poverty, there will always be human motives to scrap, to steal and to cause suffering. Arrests and policing can prevent individual crimes but, unless high rehabilitation rates are achieved, the system will always struggle to hugely reduce their numbers, and they tend to fluctuate more on their own, in large part influenced by bigger picture factors like COVID and lockdowns.
Hate crime, on the other hand, collapses and rises based on whether there are a critical mass of people invested in doling out harm - even if it's just a social media trend, just like the awful menace of animal torturers that have stalked Christchurch's streets for some years. There are plenty of levers to address hate and its impacts - education, pushing back against protests, you can go the hate speech and protected zones route even though I'm usually sceptical of those, support groups and therapy for rainbow people, addressing police’s often-hostile treatment of gay people (particularly older gay communities, often forgotten and where mistrust is massively embedded), reprimanding the own members of your community where this hate is ingrained…
The list of options goes on and on, and until the point at which our politicians address this, we have every right to be distrustful cynics of politicians who talk a big game and get paid a big wage to pontificate about crime without ever attacking its squishy underbelly. Remove hate crime and other crimes don't just pop up in its place; it's a real step towards limiting the number of violent criminals we have in Christchurch and in our country, and it’ll mean a lot to a community who, as it stands, are often deeply sceptical of the idea we can go to police and other authorities and be taken seriously, never mind receive appropriate treatment and support after the fact.
A final thought. I presume that some boomer out there (I know Kiwiblog got me if no one else got me) has already commented that these gay men shouldn’t be going into parks at night to hook up. I thought we want as safe a country as possible? To reduce crime, not tell people they should have to accept fear and vulnerability? It's bloody annoying to see the same people who whinge about rainbow activism because we're all equal and there's nothing to worry about anymore, the same people who supposedly won’t put up with a system that tolerates crimes and our cities turning unsafe, at the same time proscribing our activity and judging our movements because they know, deep down, sometimes people do make it unsafe to be gay publicly.
This is exactly why, historically, there’s such a practice of rainbow people meeting in unsafe environments where they’re out of society’s prying eyes and the way of the police patrols! Yes, we can consider an individual action to be ill-advised and something we wouldn’t recommend, but reserve your spite for the people who choose to make our parks unsafe. If your friend got beat up, would you choose caring for them as the time to
Not in a rainbow context, but I've gone on plenty of adventures around Canterbury that absolutely could be considered ill-judged on the grounds of safety, and those are my own personal lessons to learn. Would you blame me if anybody hurt me? Or would you blame the other people who could choose to enjoy their day, and instead choose to inflict harm? My fear that comes from these crimes, and this is how their effect ripples out and runs deeper than a skin-deep fear of violent crime, is that all incidents like this become a way to separate the rainbow community into two kinds of people.
In this separation, there are those who largely stay within normal, respectable bounds, and those who, just like those teenagers should have been doing with their night, go out and live adventurously and experience life to the fullest. The latter are to be judged for not joining the former. That attitude can’t be reconciled with the day that rainbow people are equal to everybody else and enjoy the full freedoms of being New Zealanders, the rough and tumble that boomers say made them so tough and the ill-judged misadventures to look back on and laugh about.
The more you push people out into the edge of the night, the more vulnerable they become, and if you react to bigots exploiting that vulnerability by judging them instead of demanding a solution, you only push them further out and the cycle continues. Be the voice in the room who makes it clear that you’re there to support rainbow people and yours is a little patch of light. It’s the choice of all of us if we wanna do that or sit on our asses while people get hurt and others take away the lesson that they need to hide. That’s the way in which you’re getting your normal, respectable ones. If rainbow people want to choose to behave in entirely regular, “normative” ways, as I frequently do, by all means that’s cool too. Yet that should be our choice - not enforced by beatings so bad to end up in the hospital and the persistent trauma that the hope and welcome you once felt has been forever taken from you, and nobody wants to help you get it back.
This got a lot longer than I expected it to, and that’s reflective of exactly what I mentioned earlier: this hate has been building for years and years, and it’s getting past time for anybody to address it. Parliament has lost a lot of its leading rainbow voices, from Louisa Wall to Kiri Allan, and while I assign them here chief moral responsibility for these failings, in the meantime it’s on everybody in the community - particularly well off, well educated communities with little open hatred - to wake up and realise how visible and affecting hate still is for people who don’t share the same life experiences as them.
The big story this week was Rishi Sunak calling a general election. Doing so this early in the year is unexpected, but I understand. The longer he waits in the year, the likelier it is that more Tories do something stupid and they fall further; the governing party has proven itself to be deeply broken and utterly unreliable. You can understand his excitement at seeing inflation at 2.3%, a startlingly great figure compared to the past few years.
More puzzling was his failure to communicate to colleagues what he was about to do. Such a total lack of confidence that they would take this well perhaps suggests the odds of yet another coup were higher than the generally accepted wisdom, that they were rumours and a fringe initiative with nothing more to them. Yet taking a few days to explain and set up the election, besides happening to dodge the bad weather and welcoming David Cameron back from Tirana in a timely fashion, would have been a win-win.
The coming announcement would surely have leaked, but there’s no harm in that; it’s not as though Labour have been catastrophically wrongfooted. The important thing is that the headlines would have enjoyed “2.3% inflation” and “Sunak going to call election on Friday morning” side by side, twinning one with the other, rather than instantly raining on the inflation parade and drowning things getting better beneath a deluge of political coverage.
There is no way in which I can possibly see the Conservatives winning this election, or even forcing Labour into a minority government. Mildly like him or somewhat dislike him, Keir Starmer’s boringness has become the watchword of the party, a black hole into which all potential scandals and missteps disappear. Put that against how eager the media are now to magnify any minute embarrassment for the Tories - none of Sunak’s awkward moments so far have really been news, just laughable trifles - and the playing field is likely to retain its enormous slant towards change.
Sunak has rolled the dice on a year of mandatory national service for 18 year olds, a daft promise clearly meant only to win angry boomers back from Reform. I’ve already savaged this concept in my Teal Card article, but let me again state all the reasons why this is a terrible policy and it’s good that it’ll never happen:
In the United Kingdom, there are ten times the 18 year olds than there are full time military personnel. Unlike, say, National’s boot camps here, which have always been a token commitment towards several dozen of the most in need kids apiece, this would represent a massive extension of an already overstrained state - and as we’ve seen here, military personnel and the like resent the prospect of being assigned to babysitting kids who…
…don’t want to be there! There’s no mandate from 18 year olds for this policy: it’d be a sharp disruption from what they (and their parents!) expect at this stage in their lives (for the vast majority, either continuing with work, graduating high school and starting down a career path, or graduating and entering university), there’s no fond nostalgia for the military unity of old amongst young people who lived not through that but through boomers whining about how we don’t have that anymore, and it is as common sense as it gets to say that young people don’t like being confined to places and ordered around. That means your participants aren’t going to be getting their best out of the program because they won’t be putting their best in, and it means that…
…this will be regarded as nothing more than a deeply inconvenient interruption in hundreds of thousands of lives. Even putting aside the loss represented by those who emigrate to avoid doing their service, probably marginal in numbers but worth considering in a country already deeply riven by mega class divides, the vast majority finishing their service are not planning to continue in the military or similar roles: they want to return to their civilian lives, and the lessons of the hard times in their life will dissolve like dew as they return to the relatively easy life in one of the freest and richest societies in the world. The bonds of camaraderie or the discipline of personal conduct will not remain - least of all when the policymakers are old Tories deeply out of touch with young people and with a strong vested interest in not bridging class boundaries. They don’t understand that, to young people, this represents…
…a huge personal cost! You’re now a year behind on getting a degree, working up the career chain, making plans to buy a first home or to emigrate. All pitted against every single year’s cohort who came before you and didn’t have to perform service. And their existence further dilutes the significance of any supposed national unity reforged, because they never shared this experience with you.
You know what I experienced last night? Full Metal Jacket (1987). Fantastic movie, I was floored by Kubrick’s visual direction, but unsurprisingly needs about every content warning under the sun. And that film brings up some very salient points about mistreatment and harm in the process of providing a military-style education. Peers and instructors gain far more power than they normally possess to be abusive, and we know from experimentation and scrutiny and the basic lessons of history that the more power people have to abuse, the more they tend to abuse it. You’re setting yourself up for culture wars a generation down the track about whether that abuse was justified or helpful or if abusers should be punished or not. No thanks.
Yes, I’m sure national service would help some people, but the path towards that is creating a more accessible and attractive optional national service for young people in need of those lessons and stability, and making it a viable rehabilitative option in the criminal justice system. This is just a final creak emitting from a party who have had fourteen years to take the country backwards and, in every respect, have done a wonderful enough job already.
Also, I enjoyed the second half of FMJ more and anybody who says the film gets worse after the first half is immune to good sense. Some of those later scenes would look and feel incredible if released in 2024. I guess that’s my media recommendation of the week! We’ll see if this becomes a running thing. Regardless, I’m pleased to have shared with you the first Weekly Defrost and am looking ahead to more in the weeks ahead.
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