Probably my most unpopular opinion

[sabotabby]

World War I killed 20 million people.

The Great Influenza epidemic killed between 17 million and 100 million during and immediately after.

The odds of a soldier dying in WWII were 1 in 26.

The odds of a kidnapped Indigenous child dying in a residential school at the same time was 1 in 25.

As a culture, the choices we make around whose deaths are mourned and whose are forgotten are significant. 

Comments

[lilysea]

& all those women who died from lack of access to safe, legal abortions...

[franklanguage]

Forgotten or even celebrated. ("She had it coming to her…")

[sabotabby]

Is anyone even counting, I wonder?

[dewline]

People are trying to get accurate counts of any number of groups of other people. This group, too, I expect.

[lynnenne]

Amen.

[sabotabby]

Thank.

[dewline]

You may well find your opinion on this point less unpopular as time goes on, I hope.

[sabotabby]

I wonder. It's certainly something I couldn't express at work or under my real name.

[dewline]

Others are expressing (variants of) it under their own real names.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/11/11/as-the-bells-toll-on-the-11th-hour-we-must-remember-the-forgotten.html

[sabotabby]

Compulsory nationalism is literally baked into the law governing my employment.

[flamingsword]

And we wonder why people don't want to be teachers, despite it being an emotionally rewarding profession.

[sabotabby]

As is sobriety and Judeo-Christian values, which aren't even a thing.

[gingicat]

Agreed.

[sabotabby]

Thank.

[numb3r_5ev3n]

A society is and will be judged by the deaths which it decides are "acceptable losses."

[sabotabby]

Yep, and we're reaping that now.

[minoanmiss]

As a culture, the choices we make around whose deaths are mourned and whose are forgotten are significant.

Word.

[sabotabby]

Thank.

[broken_record]

Hear hear.

[sabotabby]

Thank.

[ioplokon]

I'm sure it's shown up other places, too, but one I remember seeing this argument is in Judith Butler's Precarious Life.

[sabotabby]

I'm definitely not the first person to think this but glad to be in Butler's company.

[lokifan]

100%. I was at a vigil two years ago for refugees who've died trying to make it here, through Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants, and the most memorable speech talked about Remembrance Day as a day of forgetting, ignoring the people currently dying from war (and many, maybe most, of those who've died in war in the past).

[sabotabby]

I don't want to go into too much detail about what happens in schools generally but I've been in situations more often than not when it's some white teacher droning about how kids today have no gratitude to the soldiers who died in war for freedom with kids in the room who have actually experienced war firsthand.

[nostalgia]

You're not wrong. (I really really hate how Armistice Day has long since turned into patriotic/xenophobic thundering and glorification of the armed forces.)

[sabotabby]

Especially since it was really supposed to be the opposite of that.

[nostalgia]

yep :(

[lil_1337]

All of this is very true. It makes me deeply sad.

[sabotabby]

Same. I had a long chat with a co-worker about it after school, who was similarly unsettled.

[bcholmes]

Well said.

[sabotabby]

Thank.

[lapinlunaire]

WWI was a totally unnecessary, pointless war that caused way too many young people to lose their lives or end up injured or traumatised.

Residential schools were also a totally unnecessary, pointless situation that caused way too many young people to lose their lives or end up injured or traumatised.

Fuck the people responsible for both situations tbh.

(As an aside, I find it very creepy to see WWI framed in heroic terms about "fighting for freedom" because how.)

[sabotabby]

(As an aside, I find it very creepy to see WWI framed in heroic terms about "fighting for freedom" because how.)

YES this frustrates me so much. It had nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with building up the arms trade, colonialism, and imperialism. And you can see by large swathes of the world slipping into totalitarianism within a generation of it happening that even if it had been for freedom, it'd have done a really shit job of that.