‘Hidden’ Genocides

It shouldn’t take direct experience
To understand the impact
And reality
Of underfunded services

It shouldn’t take direct experience
To understand the horror
Of people waiting 12 hours in the dark and cold
For an ambulance

It shouldn’t take direct experience
To understand the consequences
Of a dystopian welfare system
And under-supporting the disabled;

Unfortunately it does, on the large scale;
It’s one of the greatest things I struggle with.

genocide (countable and uncountable, plural genocides)

The systematic and deliberate destruction of substantial numbers of people – typically by killing – on the basis of their ethnicity, religion, or nationality.

(by extension) The systematic killing of substantial numbers of people on other grounds.

(by extension) The systematic suppression of ideas or practices on the basis of cultural or ethnic origin; culturicide.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/genocide

Sometimes I just wish people would be more expressive and cut to the point. You don’t need to personally experience everything in order to imagine and understand it. And it’s ok to use shocking words where they are appropriate. And the government isn’t “failing to do anything about the situation”— it created the situation according to its ideology. Of course it’s not going to “do anything about it”. It’s almost a joke that the pandemic has helped to ‘obscure’ a lot of this, at the worst time. We are in for some serious damage overall. It is more precarious than the start of the pandemic.

How depressing is it to consider that the UK is undergoing a ‘genocide of the vulnerable’? That’s what I’m living in awareness of! The unspoken genocide. Correct me if I am wrong please.

I knew years and years ago of the horrors of disability benefits applications, from the news. It was happening all the time. I was terrified years in advance about the lack of a safety net and it was a major contributor to my mental health situation, knowing I was balancing on a knife edge and would need to use it. The hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by Conservative austerity aren’t a surprise for me at least, I’ve just learned to view it as a statistic in order to function, and it motivates my political engagement.

At least the turning point here has come at last, now that everyone knows someone who’s got a story of A&E waiting times and horrors. That’s what it takes, unfortunately, and it’s a fact of life.

Happy new year everyone! xD

🌪