Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2022-12-29 12:05 am
silveradept) wrote2022-12-29 12:05 am
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December Days 2022 #28: Protective
[What's December Days this year? Taking a crowdsourced list of adjectives and seeing if I can turn them into saying good things about myself. Or at least good things to talk about.]
Protective takes a lot of possible forms. We tend to think of it in a physical form, with shields, armor, and weapons, things meant to stop a hostile entity from achieving their objective, or something meant to preserve life or the numerical equivalent of it (games tend to give us numerical equivalents of these things, after all.) We call the relevant agency that removes children from hostile and abusive environments Child Protective Services, for example, and it's easier to make the case when there is physical harm and the marks thereof. Military and police are nominally supposed to protect the population against invasion, crime, or other anti-social actions, and to carry out that directive, the State grants them the power to wield its monopoly on violence. The right wing of the United States tends to insist that the people changed with carrying out the State's demand for violence be valorized and lionized, and as you can see by watching U.S. television and cinema and playing a lot of U.S. interactive media, our media apparatuses are hard at work ensuring that there's plenty of heroic representation of the police and the military of the United States. Even in some pieces where the antagonists are police or military people, it's very rare to see a media piece where all of the police or military are unrepentant and doing evil things. The reality is that much of the police and military are structurally aligned more to the fugitive slave patrol than "to serve and protect," and our airwaves and experiences are much more saturated with "copaganda" to get white, usually conservative, people to think of the police and military as protectors and heroes instead of agents of State violence. (Truthfully, they do tend to protect rich white people and rich white people's property more than anything or anyone else, so there's a grain of truth in there.)
There's a grotesque image I've seen circulated around that has a mother (maybe a soldier, sometimes) who is talking to or reading to or otherwise behaving parentally or normally toward the child, who cannot see the world around them. The mother is suffering from several wounds in her back, delivered by arrows from the world outside. The arrows are usually labeled on their shafts with whatever the image creator believes are the evils of the world outside. (Given how often this image is spread in politically and religiously conservative circles, common labels of our times would probably include "wokeness," "critical race theory," "secularism," and "transgenderism.") The implication is that the mother is protecting her children from harm by taking the arrows meant for her children, and that, by itself, is a grotesquerie, but the image twists the knife on the mother by depicting her as not showing any pain or discomfort as she is stuck with these wounds, condemning her to suffer in silence, even as it depicts more arrows in flight that will surely find their way into her as well. Good mothers, it says, take all the abuse and never show how much it hurts them, and they make sure their children are never touched by the world outside. For their own protection, no doubt.
For a significant number of those children, those teenagers and those adults, the State and their own parents are more dangerous to them than the outside world. And, for the most part, because the State chooses to look the other way or worse, signals that it intend to prosecute those who support and protect their children from the demands of theocrats, certain types of attacks go unpunished. They are rarely physical attacks until after several stages of escalation at the supposed intransigence of desiring too live as the person you are and be recognized as such. The way things are structured, however, assumes that someone who is trying to separate themselves from their caregivers over these issues is immature and not making a rational decision, and so is usually returned to the place that harms them until they are able to more permanently and legally get away (or are permanently and legally sent away.) There are significantly less resources to protect against those who never leave a physical mark but abuse all the same.
Being an adult didn't necessarily mean the ordeals are finished. When the State seeks the information of those who defy the theocratic classification of the world, or the neighbors take it upon themselves to destroy your symbols of identity and affiliation with people who defy the theocratic classifications in your nominally private property, because those symbols offend their conception of what the neighborhood "should" be, or your become the target of concerted and coordinated online attacks (some of which may escalate to physical threats to your safety), there's precious little resources available to protect yourself, and the people who are nominally supposed to protect you from there vitriol of others are often or always busy with other things or they tell you to come back when there's enough evidence that physical harm might actually happen imminently.
I do not know what I would do in situations where being protective of someone else would require physical intervention. I have occasionally been present to act as a deterrent, with my authority to control my work space, and sometimes exercise that authority to dismiss someone for the good of maintaining a welcoming space. I have given another person grief over their ableism when they began renaming to no one in particular how they felt trapped by a walker that didn't block their emergency exits and wasn't bothering them in any way. I opine a lot, here and on other platforms, about injustices and cruelties visited on those who deserve to live as people, instead of as targets for the various strains of -isms. I would like to have more resources to bring to bear on those things that cause hurts to the people who are in my household or who are part of an affiliated group, to shield them from the often deliberate cruelties that others wish to inflict on them.
So, in at least some regards, yes, I'm protective, or I want to be, but instead of the expectation of suffering in silence or only of protecting others by taking the hurts for them, I want to see the systems changed so that those who use slings, bows, and other weapons to strike at me and mine have their weapons broken and their swords transformed into plowshares so they may contribute to the work of reparations. I can't promise I will be one hundred percent effective at it, nor that my desire for change will be pointed in the right direction or advocating for the things that would be most helpful (or helpful at all.) I only promise to try, and to try not to sulk in front of others when I inevitably suffer failure as I try.
- protective (comparative more protective, superlative most protective)
- Serving or intended to protect.
- Wishing to protect; defensive of somebody or something.
Protective takes a lot of possible forms. We tend to think of it in a physical form, with shields, armor, and weapons, things meant to stop a hostile entity from achieving their objective, or something meant to preserve life or the numerical equivalent of it (games tend to give us numerical equivalents of these things, after all.) We call the relevant agency that removes children from hostile and abusive environments Child Protective Services, for example, and it's easier to make the case when there is physical harm and the marks thereof. Military and police are nominally supposed to protect the population against invasion, crime, or other anti-social actions, and to carry out that directive, the State grants them the power to wield its monopoly on violence. The right wing of the United States tends to insist that the people changed with carrying out the State's demand for violence be valorized and lionized, and as you can see by watching U.S. television and cinema and playing a lot of U.S. interactive media, our media apparatuses are hard at work ensuring that there's plenty of heroic representation of the police and the military of the United States. Even in some pieces where the antagonists are police or military people, it's very rare to see a media piece where all of the police or military are unrepentant and doing evil things. The reality is that much of the police and military are structurally aligned more to the fugitive slave patrol than "to serve and protect," and our airwaves and experiences are much more saturated with "copaganda" to get white, usually conservative, people to think of the police and military as protectors and heroes instead of agents of State violence. (Truthfully, they do tend to protect rich white people and rich white people's property more than anything or anyone else, so there's a grain of truth in there.)
There's a grotesque image I've seen circulated around that has a mother (maybe a soldier, sometimes) who is talking to or reading to or otherwise behaving parentally or normally toward the child, who cannot see the world around them. The mother is suffering from several wounds in her back, delivered by arrows from the world outside. The arrows are usually labeled on their shafts with whatever the image creator believes are the evils of the world outside. (Given how often this image is spread in politically and religiously conservative circles, common labels of our times would probably include "wokeness," "critical race theory," "secularism," and "transgenderism.") The implication is that the mother is protecting her children from harm by taking the arrows meant for her children, and that, by itself, is a grotesquerie, but the image twists the knife on the mother by depicting her as not showing any pain or discomfort as she is stuck with these wounds, condemning her to suffer in silence, even as it depicts more arrows in flight that will surely find their way into her as well. Good mothers, it says, take all the abuse and never show how much it hurts them, and they make sure their children are never touched by the world outside. For their own protection, no doubt.
For a significant number of those children, those teenagers and those adults, the State and their own parents are more dangerous to them than the outside world. And, for the most part, because the State chooses to look the other way or worse, signals that it intend to prosecute those who support and protect their children from the demands of theocrats, certain types of attacks go unpunished. They are rarely physical attacks until after several stages of escalation at the supposed intransigence of desiring too live as the person you are and be recognized as such. The way things are structured, however, assumes that someone who is trying to separate themselves from their caregivers over these issues is immature and not making a rational decision, and so is usually returned to the place that harms them until they are able to more permanently and legally get away (or are permanently and legally sent away.) There are significantly less resources to protect against those who never leave a physical mark but abuse all the same.
Being an adult didn't necessarily mean the ordeals are finished. When the State seeks the information of those who defy the theocratic classification of the world, or the neighbors take it upon themselves to destroy your symbols of identity and affiliation with people who defy the theocratic classifications in your nominally private property, because those symbols offend their conception of what the neighborhood "should" be, or your become the target of concerted and coordinated online attacks (some of which may escalate to physical threats to your safety), there's precious little resources available to protect yourself, and the people who are nominally supposed to protect you from there vitriol of others are often or always busy with other things or they tell you to come back when there's enough evidence that physical harm might actually happen imminently.
I do not know what I would do in situations where being protective of someone else would require physical intervention. I have occasionally been present to act as a deterrent, with my authority to control my work space, and sometimes exercise that authority to dismiss someone for the good of maintaining a welcoming space. I have given another person grief over their ableism when they began renaming to no one in particular how they felt trapped by a walker that didn't block their emergency exits and wasn't bothering them in any way. I opine a lot, here and on other platforms, about injustices and cruelties visited on those who deserve to live as people, instead of as targets for the various strains of -isms. I would like to have more resources to bring to bear on those things that cause hurts to the people who are in my household or who are part of an affiliated group, to shield them from the often deliberate cruelties that others wish to inflict on them.
So, in at least some regards, yes, I'm protective, or I want to be, but instead of the expectation of suffering in silence or only of protecting others by taking the hurts for them, I want to see the systems changed so that those who use slings, bows, and other weapons to strike at me and mine have their weapons broken and their swords transformed into plowshares so they may contribute to the work of reparations. I can't promise I will be one hundred percent effective at it, nor that my desire for change will be pointed in the right direction or advocating for the things that would be most helpful (or helpful at all.) I only promise to try, and to try not to sulk in front of others when I inevitably suffer failure as I try.