I live in a pleasant, quiet Home Counties’ village. We have no thatched cottages or Anglo-Saxon Church so do not attract tourists. Our last fully functioning pub disappeared a few years ago and the shop, Post Office, petrol station and butcher before that.
Buses are as rare as Golden Eagles. There are just too many large towns nearby to allow the village to sustain its own infrastructure. The village has a thriving school and wide range of clubs and societies. It has a highly active Facebook page which has come into its own during the Pandemic lockdown.
I love living here and never met anybody who did not.
The residents are mostly retired or young middle-class professionals who work, I guess, in the surrounding towns. A motorway is nearby and commuting to London is an option. I have always assumed a lot of Daily Mails are delivered.
The other day something quite remarkable happened. A group of the village’s young people made some Black Lives Matter posters and erected them at the village crossroads. Their intention was to show solidarity with the wider movement and continue the debate. They took some photographs and returned home. When they arrived home, they were informed the posters had been torn down, destroyed and put into a waste bin.
They took to the village Facebook page to announce this, more in a sense of exasperation than anger. Why would anyone wish to do this, they asked? If anyone has a problem with Black Lives Matter let us have a civilised debate about it, they suggested.
Suddenly several people who were not regular contributors to the Facebook page began to respond.
Now it must be said most of the reactions were positive and supportive but there was a selection of hateful comments. Churchill was dragged in (isn’t he always!) with the suggestion that people of colour would have suffered far more if the Nazis had won WWII! So, shut up and be grateful was the message there, I guess. There was the usual “all lives matter” pushback and white people have a tough time as well. The responses to these were polite and structured. Evidence on systemic racism was shared.
A poster appeared about a white man who had been shot by the US police with the allegation that nobody made such a fuss about that. The white man portrayed as a victim, being punished in the shadow of movements like Me To and Black Lives Matter with nobody caring, is an old, evidence-free, trope. Perhaps the contributor wanted the US police to shoot more white people in some bizarre drive to equalize things up.
I was pleased and surprised the Black Lives Matter debate had reached my village. That so many took part in the debate, although for some it was an uncomfortable experience with people perhaps having to face up to their own views. The majority of comments were supportive of the movement and deplored the tearing down of the posters.
It made me reassess the village I have lived in for many years and perhaps it was not the rural reactionary stronghold I had long supposed. It was for me a reminder that life can be more nuanced than I sometimes suppose, and perhaps more people hold progressive views that I sometimes give credit for.
Although the debate got a bit heated, it was pretty gentle compared, say, to the comments page of the Daily Mail Online. It was certainly no more hostile than the criticism aimed at those who leave dog poo lying around the village. The initiative came from a group whose voices are rarely heard and who do not regularly contribute to the village Facebook page and that must be a good thing.
While the debate raged, the moderator sat with finger posed over the delete button. There was understandable concern that matters could get out of hand but we never really approached that point.
In the end the debate just ran out of steam and the Moderator closed the page down with the comment “strange how the people who are so active on here have remained silent”.
Perhaps the answer to that was sitting in plain sight!
……..and the person responsible for tearing down the posters never did come forward.
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