Quote by Angela Davis, photo by Susan Alzner. https://www.instagram.com/p/BMui8RkD_1B/
While we comply with bigotry and abuses against peoples and lands, #NoLivesMatter.
While we consume and share #FakeNews because it appeals to our echo-chamber filters and we remain too lazy to fact check for ourselves, #NoLivesMatter.
While we continue to deny climate change, drill for oil in the oceans, scar the land for fossil fuels, reject renewable energy innovations, plunge toxic waste and discarded plastics into landfill, #NoLivesMatter.
While we bicker about two party politics and Left vs Right, oppress otherness and seek to control and deny diversity, #NoLivesMatter.
While we fight over cheap TVs on #BlackFriday and mark National Holidays which celebrate the destruction of cultures centuries older than our own, #NoLivesMatter.
While we cut funding and recognition for the necessity of art, culture, education, knowledge, scientific exploration and research into unknown unknowns, #NoLivesMatter.
While we tolerate the abject poverty and human pain caused by austerity measures, #NoLivesMatter.
While tax breaks for the rich are more widespread than food banks for the poor, #NoLivesMatter.
While house prices soar, mortgages crash and homelessness becomes a crime, #NoLivesMatter.
While it’s acceptably ‘funny’ to grab women by the pussy and rapists walk free, while white men in suits control what women do with their own bodies and unpaid/underpaid labour for women is the norm, and while ‘no’ is not allowed to mean “NO”, #NoLivesMatter.
While openly loving the person you happen to love might risk your, or their, physical harm, #NoLivesMatter.
While the end of human life on earth races rapidly toward us and we not only do nothing to prevent it but abjectly increase our destruction of it, #NoLivesMatter.
While media moguls control everything that we see and hear and whistleblowers are jailed for daring to speak otherwise, #NoLivesMatter.
While military budgets increase, profits for selling arms to our alleged enemies continue to go unchallenged, and instead we blame those seeking asylum for the damage our greed has caused, #NoLivesMatter.
While children are stolen from Indigenous families, their deaths in custody and suicide rates soar and institutionalised racism goes unchecked under the myth of ‘free speech’, #NoLivesMatter.
While the innocent are incarcerated and abused for simply seeking the freedom and luxury we Westerners have dangled tauntingly in their faces against their backdrops of corruption, devastation and death, #NoLivesMatter.
While law enforcers protect the rights of the few, not the many, #NoLivesMatter.
While hate crimes are normalised and people live in fear for their very existence, #NoLivesMatter.
While global economies burn and offshore tax havens blossom, #NoLivesMatter.
While every comment you make online is surveilled, every internet-enabled device tracks every movement, and every step on the streets is absorbed and analysed with facial recognition databases, #NoLivesMatter.
While governments continue to maintain the inequalities of the status quo and electoral reforms removing money and religion from governance are no more than a theory discussed in the abstract, #NoLivesMatter.
While being ‘different’ in any way at all, by birth or by choice, means you live every single day of your life in fear, #NoLivesMatter.
While keyboard warriors bicker over #AllLivesMatter and proactive action sits quietly in the too hard basket, #NoLivesMatter.
While human rights are deemed less important than profit, #NoLivesMatter.
Water’s life matters. Land’s life matters. Every human and creature on the planet’s life matters. What the fuck are we waiting for? There is no salvation, there’s only you. It’s time to step up, speak out, not just for yourself or your own demographic, but for every human and natural entity on this rich and diverse planet. Life is an astonishing gift. Don’t waste it. Make it matter.