YouTube link is here. Intermittent kitties.
This week we have breaking news. And William is shook! So much so that he finally has to leave for a bit. But then he comes back. And don’t worry, you’ve got full-time Tony, no matter what. He’d never leave you. Enjoy!
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While you weren’t my news source, I did skip ahead to this episode when I saw the title. I agree, I think there was very little fault to find with Her Majesty herself, however there is/can be a lot of controversy over the need for a monarch at all.
I’ve generally had a complicated reaction to the queen’s death.
At first, I felt a sense of loss over one thing she stood for for me — a sense of responsibility to others, kind of an antidote to the extremes of individualism shading into narcissism that I tend to associate more with American culture. When I was in England in May of this year and everyone I knew, whether generally from the left or right politically, was condemning Boris Johnson for the whole COVID-parties scandal, I kept thinking, wow, a country where bad behavior actually still means something to people. I think the Queen represented that for me about Britain. It also reminded me of the book I read about T.E. Lawrence called “Lawrence in Arabia” and the way in which a sense of honor came into conflict for many English people (not all of course) with England’s colonialism.
But then I was also thinking about colonialism, and treatment of the working-class, and recent immigration policies in the UK. And some friends posting on social media who are from former (recent) British colonies were talking about how they couldn’t mourn for the Queen. In particular, I was thinking about some of the atrocities that happened in places like Kenya during her reign and the cover-up of colonial policies in lots of places–especially because that fact that a lot of documentation had been lost/erased came out fairly recently (2011 – see “Operation Legacy”).
And then I was thinking that she didn’t have a direct role in a lot of these policies, but she had to have knowledge of the way people were being treated or were suffering. I don’t mean knowledge that you’d have to be part of the government to know, but just things that one would know from watching the news or reading the paper.
And she didn’t comment on any of these things. Or address the fact that her wealth and privilege derived from this suffering.
On the other hand, one could say she was a product of her time and upbringing, and that upbringing instructed her that it was not her role to speak of these things.
If that’s how I’m seeing her (as a product of her time), then it doesn’t seem like I can either praise her for her sense of duty or criticize her for her failure to use her immense privilege to try to address the suffering that that privilege came from. But, I don’t know, I still feel like she bears responsibility? I just don’t know.
The one thing that I did decide is that all of this is worth bringing up for thought/discussion.
Yeah, pretty-much ditto to all of that…
Yeah, no one is perfect, and especially no celebrity is as good or bad as they seem in the public eye. We’ve all got layers.
I don’t know enough to know what she might’ve done wrong. But I know the country’s history. I mean, I liked Obama a lot, but I know a lot of things that went down on his watch, some of which he ordered, some of which he just was very quiet about.
It’s the whole “everyone deals with death differently” thing again, I think. It applies to people you’ve never met, as well.