religion

Trouble, Fury and Hurt In Woolwich

Something happened yesterday afternoon which made me furious at the time, and which I still think I ought to record here. It was turning out to be a nice day, so at about noon after a short trip to Eltham High Street, I decided to catch the bus to Woolwich. I was planning to catch the Elisabeth Line to Liverpool Street in order to check out a bit more of the phenomenal building work around there. Getting off the bus at General Gordon Square though, I almost immediately encountered a lady shouting nonsense about Jesus, whereupon my instincts kicked in and I told her to shut up. Her reaction was far from pleasant: she instantly became very angry, and rather that trying to talk to me and discuss the issue, she retorted that my lack of faith was the reason I was disabled, or words to that effect.

Needless to say, this made me furious. I saw red, and decided that I wanted the woman either arrested or sectioned. As coincidence would have it, there were three community support guys (quazi policemen) nearby, who came over to see what the increasing noise was about. To my absolute horror and disgust, however, they completely refused to see what I was typing into my Ipad to tell them. They only listened to the woman, and seemed to assume I had nothing to say. It was as if they didn’t know communication aid users existed, or register that I was trying to speak to them.

Being treated with such disrespect naturally enraged me even further. The entire incident only lasted a minute or two. When the officers started to walk away, I tried to follow them, still wanting to speak to them – perhaps I could ask why the ignorant bastards had ignored me like that. But they strutted away as though they had assumed I had nothing sensible to tell them, heading to their offices up Wellington Street.

By then I was angrier than I had been in a long, long time. I headed into the Woolwich Centre opposite: perhaps I could talk to someone in there who could call the police or take some kind of action. To have been ignored by the officers like that was gut-wrenchingly disgraceful. Fortunately I know the people in The Woolwich Centre as they’re the guys who do my PA payroll etc, and to cut a long story short they helped me to lodge a complaint. Whether anything will come of it remains to be seen of course, but I felt it imperative that I took some kind of action. To have been treated in that way, first being insulted by that woman, then totally ignored and even sneered at by the very men who are supposed to sort such issues out, felt very hurtful indeed. I frankly find it extremely troubling that I can still be treated in the way I was yesterday.

Not The Protest I Expected

I just got back from another trip to Westminster, and I think it’s fair to say that I’m absolutely furious. I went up there again today, this time to check out the protests about the assisted dying bill. To be honest I don’t have that strong an opinion on the issue as I can see both sides of the argument, but by and large I share the fear that it could lead to vulnerable and disabled people being pressured into ending their lives.

I got to Parliament Square to find it slightly quieter than I had been expecting: this event obviously wasn’t as big as the last one I had been to up there. It took me a while to find the protest, slightly along the road from the Houses of Parliament. When I did, though, I was almost instantly appalled. I had been expecting to find plenty of my fellow disabled people, but instead the action was peopled by able-bodied religious nutcases! There were speeches being made about how this act would go against the will of god, the commandments and everything. While disabled people and our rights were mentioned once or twice, the emphasis seemed to be on religion, particularly Christianity. To begin with I could just about tolerate it, but when the lady speaking invited everyone to pray I had had enough.

Political protests are, by their very definition, political; and religion has no place whatsoever in politics. These people were close imposing their religious views on quite a critical issue, and essentially using it to promote their anachronistic belief system. You don’t need to believe in any gods to be concerned about what might arise from this change in the law, and that, sooner or later vulnerable people may start feeling pressured into opting to end their lives when they otherwise might not. That would strike anyone with a grain of human decency as problematic. Yet the people there were trying to make it seem like an entirely religious issue, and that they were acting on behalf of their god.

I have written many entries on here about what I think about religion: it is a harmful, dangerous anachronism which humanity needs to outgrow. Thus to find these people there, usurping the issue at hand for their idiotic belief system, really pissed me off. Fortunately the event was drawing to a clear by the time I got there, but it really pissed me off to see it being hijacked like that. This is quite a sensitive political issue: it needs to be dealt with rationally and thoughtfully, not by people who derive their entire worldview from a set of bronze age fairytales.