My favourite picture from the UK Trump protest, just because of how I got the Incredibles poster to line up.
It all went without a hitch apart from a random blonde woman at the end who approached my group to basically say why are you protesting, Trump’s not that bad? I had a placard saying ‘end child internment’ and she went on a spiel about how it was totally the parents’ fault their children were locked up and also Hillary, it totally came back to Hillary somehow. So that was very odd and unwelcome. (We just walked off and left her once it was obvious she was a troll.)
There were lots of groups there and lots of parents with kids. I didn’t get to see anyone talk because we just weren’t near enough to any stages, so that was a bit disappointing. But I hope Trump takes the whole protest as the kick up the arse it was intended to be…
I keep running across articles about the various stolen items Britain has in its museums. (As you definitely know already, that one scene in Black Panther was notttttt a work of fiction.) The scale of the problem seems utterly and infuriatingly vast…
However, the V&A want to ‘shine a light’ on this tragic story with an exhibition this April 2018, because finally they are ‘open to the idea’ of sending the treasures back to Ethiopia – but only on borrowed time due to the laws! This is extremely undermining and insulting to the Ethiopian community.
And there was also a petition about the Benin bronzes (the specific treasures in the linked article) but it’s been taken down.
There’s a heatwave in the UK again and just a healthy reminder that comments like “lol thats not hot” or laughing at people suffering in the heat is not cool or funny. Just because it’s not hot for you doesn’t mean it’s hot for us. The mortality rate rises dramatically whenever we have a heatwave. We’re an island that’s on average between 3C (37.4F) in the Winter and 24C (75.2F) in the Summer. We don’t build our roads or buildings to deal with this kind of heat so when it gets unusually hot there is no where for us to go. There are very few buildings with air con other than huge office blocks and some largescale restaurants.
We’re expecting temperatures of 30C+ (86F+) within the span of a week, so anyone in the UK make sure to drink plenty of water and take regular breaks if you need to. A cold shower in the morning and at night will also help you hydrate!
I think I probably post this every year too, but for all the people who ask “Why don’t the government do something about the infrastructure/health crisis…”
One year on from Finsbury Park today. Every time I hear about it I wanna bring this up – the terrorist who did it had already killed one Muslim man with his car and tried to run away when (understandably) the crowd started attacking him. The imam of the Finsbury mosque, Mohammed Mahmoud, grabbed the terrorist, told the others not to touch him, and delivered him to a police van. He probably saved the life of a person who wouldn’t have thought twice about killing him too.
The Finsbury Park mosque still receives death threats.
Actually, you know what, I will post those pictures of the building I used to live in. Name of the building withheld to protect the guilty, but if you live near Leicester train station you’ve probably walked past it…
Image 1: loads of trash bags, boxes and some sort of loose, easy-to-trip-over plastic sheet lying on the floor. Yep, this was the way to the fire escape, great huh?
Image 2: One of the fire escape doors with… guess what… more boxes and bags piled up alongside it. There’s like a tiny space a person could run through to get to the door, hooray. (Sorry this picture’s so blurry. Yes, it does say ‘Keep clear’ on the door!)
Image 3: A WHOPPING BIG shiny new padlock on the old fire escape door, preventing anyone from opening it! How thoughtful.
Image 4: The fire escape area, which is… overgrown as hell, plants in the way and hey! More rubbish right next to the door.
One of the reasons the Grenfell Tower disaster hit me so hard is because I also used to live in a building that wasn’t safe and decent. It wasn’t a high-rise, luckily, but to get to the fire escape on my floor you had to literally pick your way across people’s trash that had been dumped there, and once you were out on the escape the door at the bottom was locked. (I still have pictures of all that.) The fire alarm didn’t work properly either, because sometimes it would go off at 8pm and not stop all night. It looked nice on the outside (like Grenfell was supposed to) but it was a horrible, dangerous place to live. The windows didn’t even open properly. The last time I saw it I think they’d improved things a bit but I have no doubt that if a major fire had broken out at the time I was there, plenty of people might not have made it. And no-one ever heard our complaints, just moved us along to the next people, who moved us along to the next people, and so on.
…God, yeah. British housing is a horror right now, and even after Grenfell so little is done. :(
[Image 1: A wide shot of a high-rise building in London with almost all of it blackened by fire. Image 2: The same building with the damage hidden by scaffolding and a large banner reading “Grenfell, forever in our hearts” opposite a green heart symbol.]
–
Today (June 14) is the first anniversary of the Grenfell Tower disaster. 72 people died, the vast majority of them working class, black, migrants, disabled, or Muslims. (Or a combination of more than one of those descriptors.) Many were young children, as well. The whole terrible, avoidable incident remains a massive stain on modern-day Britain. The survivors and the families of the victims still haven’t got justice for what happened.
I think about Grenfell a lot and I really want to do something, but there’s so little useful stuff I can do, especially since I can’t get to London easily from where I am in the UK. So today I’m gonna do the one thing I actually can do, which is post detailed tributes to all the 72 people who died, quoting the family members they left behind and explaining who they were and what they did.
Obviously, this comes with huge trigger warnings. Any details about victims’ deaths, rather than their lives, will be described as clinically and distantly as possible. However many family members have made it clear that they want the world to know the exact way their loved ones died, and I’ll be posting quotes from those people as well. It’s incredibly difficult stuff to read so all posts will be tagged “grenfell” “grenfell tower” and “trigger warning.” I hope that’s sufficient.
For more about Grenfell, the Guardian has covered it very extensively. You may also want to look at the hashtags #justiceforgrenfell and #justice4grenfell on twitter, where many survivors’ groups have made their voices heard.
Once I’ve finished posting about the victims I’m going to make another post talking about all the people who came out to help that night when they didn’t have to, and all the people who are still fighting for justice.
Prime Minister Theresa May has said she regrets her reaction to the tragedy, and she should. Many of the people she promised to rehouse still don’t have houses.
Again please be sure to blacklist the trigger warnings if you need to! This post is tagged with them too.
#Justice4Grenfell
–
Edit: Here are all the tribute posts, in alphabetical order by last name:
Donald Trump will be coming to Britain later this year and is likely trying to arrange a meeting with the Queen. This is hopeless optimism talking, but my dearest hope is that she rejects him somehow. The Queen is, apart from the pesky “being female” part, pretty much everything Donald wants to be – she’s relatively powerful, really popular, and most importantly of all incredibly rich. Her refusing to see him would send a serious message. C’mon, Lizzie. Use your powers for good for once.
