Your Children Will Be Next

I’m driving back from my appointment with a Work Coach at a job centre. I was very ready for this to be a degrading experience, in which I would be questioned about why I wasn’t applying to jobs that would cause me to become ill and kill myself. It has been that in the past. This wasn’t that, so this blog isn’t about that.

I realise too late I didn’t take my pills this morning. They have an appetite suppressant effect (a side effect, but a welcome one) so without them I’m ravenous. I get some Nik Naks from the corner shop and pull into the apartment block car park to eat them. My phone is out of batteries so I turn the radio on.

“…that is the News at Twelve O’Clock on BBC Two…now, Jeremy Vine. GOOD AFTERNOON, Girl Guides have banned trans girls from becoming new members, is this fai-”

Nasty little pissant. Let’s tune around a bit. This bag is huge. Too many calories. Probably all I’m going to eat today, I’ll take the pill when I get in. Let’s find something else.

“…and on the street tonight an old man plays; with newspaper cuttings of his glory da-”

I turn it off.

You probably know the background of ‘If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next’, the best, or at least more enduring, song on the Manic Street Preacher’s 1998 album ‘This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours’. To refresh your memory, the title is from a poster propagated by the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. It depicts a dead child below a sky full of bombers. The song’s lyrics are themed on that war.

It’s a good song. It’s currently the most played song by the Manics on Spotify. I think A Design For Life is better, but probably just because it’s on a better album. But whatever. This blog isn’t about that.

I wish I could feel numb to the feeling of having the erosion of transgender life, especially the life and prospects of transgender children. I don’t. After I got into my flat, I saw that the Women’s Institute was also going to ban trans women. I wasn’t ever going to be a member of either organisation. None of this is going to effect my personally. It still feels as though I am slowly being vivisected, in the middle of a stage, while the audience shouts that I’m sick for making them do this.

So I felt that feeling. I turned off the music, I ate my Nik Naks. Then I remembered the context of the song, and felt another familiar pain.

What right do you have to compare this to real suffering?

I have a project on the go. I have many projects on the go, the lion’s share dormant weeks and months. It is a visual novel of sorts, in which the player has to transcribe professional, friendly work emails perfectly while they listen to my voice performing a monologue at them, giving more than a little tip of the hat to Davey Wreden’s ‘The Beginner’s Guide’. At certain points in the script, the email that the player has to transcribe are replaced with text detailed the atrocities committed in Gaza.

If the player makes a mistake a loud harsh noise plays, the monologue is rewound to the beginning of the current passage, and the player must start it again. The game, partially stealing its title from a tweet that stuck with me from a few months ago, was to be called “40,000 people are dead and you need to do your emails”. That was the death toll in Gaza when I first thought of the concept. It’s more than 70,000 now. 18,000 children.

I finished the monologue, I started the coding. Then, I thought better of it.

Shortly after I conceived of the project, I got invited to resign from my job, because I was simply too depressed to get up and do my emails. That is why I was at the job centre today, performing my duties so that I could receive Universal Credit.

I opened the monologue to write this blog, to see if I could give a sample here. But it’s meandering. It’s whiny. It’s about the struggles I was having with staying employed while the world turned to evil, a problem that ultimately just resulted in me asking my friends and loved ones for money and sitting around playing video games for a month until I was well enough to look for work.

Nobody was going to drop bombs on me. Nobody was going to make me bury my child. I have a warm home, I am fed.

It’s obscene for you to mention your ‘pain’ in the same breath.

I realised this even when writing the monologue. It talks about transphobia, it takes about Gaza, it talks about simple not being able to get up in the morning. It’s a personal piece. It wasn’t intended to have anybody come away from it feeling happy, or fulfilled, or to even have a new perspective. I was miserable. I wanted other people to see the misery, and share in it.

Acknowledging how self-absorbed it is to be primarily affected by distant atrocities in terms of not being able to do my email job, I shelved the project. Occasionally I think about going back to it, until I remember why I decided I can’t. It felt too much like I was co-opting something. Sure, thousands of children have been murdered, but did you know I’m sad sometimes?

I acknowledged this in the monologue, but that wasn’t enough. You don’t get away with acting like that just because you recognise it.

So it’s a good thing I never completed it.

There are people in the world with real problems

After I turned the radio off, I came inside, I put on music, and I started writing this. I have been trying and failing to write blogs for days now, in between job applications. Of course the one that I actually manage to write is about me.

My flat is warm. There’s music playing, I have fresh flowers in the window. I have my medication and food if I want more.

Nobody is going to take these things from me. These attacks (and why does it feels wrong to call them that?) will not affect me (but they will affect others – can’t you just feel empathy?). I will never join the WI. I am decades too old to be a girl guide.

There are no bombers flying overhead. There are no missiles come to kill me and everybody I love.

If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will Be Next

I hate that these things cause me so much pain. It feels unfair. Selfish. And that guilt, that self-flagellation, becomes a part of it.

How dare this become part of the cacophony that caused me to lose my job, when there are so many worse things happening?

How dare this actually be the more dominant one, when it hasn’t actually affected me personally Losing a job was the worst thing to happen to me recently, and that wasn’t even because of transphobia.

The cumulative effect of the horrors of the world – mostly, selfishly, the horrors closer to home – simply meant I stopped working. They had no choice but to fire me. I wasn’t even fired. I was invited to resign for my health after my sick pay ran out, rather than go through the capability dismissal procedure. There you go again, pretending you have it worse than you do.

If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will Be Next, Will Be Next, Will Be Next, Will Be Next

What good do there emotions do? What good does writing this and publishing it do? Do I hope that somebody will come and absolve me? Or is this just a private confessional, as in all likelihood friends will perhaps open it, recognise the tone, and decline to continue?

Or do I hope that friends will see it and recognise some of this in themselves? That I’ll be speaking to some kindred souls?

The pain isn’t uniform and it isn’t rational. The song by the Manics makes me think of the trans children who will grow up isolated and in agony. Which makes me think of the children who died in the 1930s, and feel shame for implicitly comparing the two. Which makes me think of the children slaughtered in Gaza, and the shame intensifies.

I want to examine these parts of me and come out a better person. And I want all of the children, living and dead, to be held close by loving families, and to be able to have a future. I believe that I do want that.

I believe that is the source of all of this pain.

I want to believe that it isn’t all about me.