We Fear Change

‘We fear change’
Garth – Wayne's World (1992)

Is it true though? Is it change we fear, or the challenge it represents? Some see change as a challenge to be avoided, while others view it as an opportunity to be embraced. Yes well before we disappear down that rabbit-hole, it’s not the purpose of this blog and may end up being one of its very own. As it is I will most likely lose an hour of my life writing this [ed: No I lost well over two hours], so thank you to the good friend who dared me. You may well find that to have been a tactical error on a par with ‘That valley looks quiet.. let’s trot over and see if we can find any Russians..’

So to business. I posted on Facebook that I was not going to comment on the George Floyd / racism issue as I have no trust that the originators of photos/videos/reports do so in good faith and that what they depict is a true reflection of the event(s). A good friend commented daring me to post. Be careful what you wish for, because here goes!

N.B. Another good friend, supervising my Masters dissertation, once commented that I was seeing connections everywhere and needed to narrow my focus. It’s happening again.. Nurse! Quickly.. my dried frog pills! Thus this blog far from being on racism is on the general issue of Prejudice.

Prejudice – which in this context is defined as ‘the fear of someone different’ - has existed for centuries, probably millennia.

As a disabled man I have in the last half century (shush I heard that!) encountered both sides, personally and via friends. I was very fortunate to grow up in the 1970s and 80s when attitudes were changing. Change needs a catalyst, sometimes a regular nudge in the right direction will give incremental change. Other times the catalyst may be a major event or a person. In the case of disability, and particularly disability sport, Chris Hallam, aka Shades, John Harris and Tanni Grey-Thompson among others were that catalyst. Some people are small pebbles thrown in a lake, and cause ripples; Chris Hallam in particular was something of a hand grenade; the force of his personality, and that of the others I have mentioned, ensured that the momentum they created continued and built faster and faster.

In the mid-1970s my Dad took me into Cardiff to a book signing by the English rugby player Bill Beaumont. We were at the front of the queue, little me in my wheelchair holding the precious book awaiting the arrival of the great man. As he sat down a thinks.. censor, OK Pick a polite word .. an individual pushed in front of me and put his book on the table for it to be signed. The great man – now knighted and not before time IMHO – looked at him, the book, then at me, and spoke;

I think you’ll find this young man was first..

With that he took my book and signed it! I have never forgotten that.. it was the first time anyone other than family and friends had treated me with respect, and as a person with a disability.

There have been other more negative incidents which occurred to me, and I regret that they are actually more recent than the above, but those are for another time. The incident below happened to a school friend.

The friend was celebrating being accepted to study for a degree at university and was leaving a fast-food restaurant with their mother. My friend is in a wheelchair, and a thinks, remembers censor … person approached them and said to the mother ‘I work with the mentally disabled, would she like a lollipop?’ Yeah.. that did not go so well for the enquirer, as my friend spoke on her own behalf, and took no prisoners. Suffice to say the enquirer’s shortcomings were explained to them in detail and the offer of a lollipop was not accepted. I’m pretty sure everyone reading this saw that coming.

However, the impetus created by Hallam, Harris, Grey-Thompson et al endured and built to the point where we have progressed from individual incidents such as happened to me and related above, to the London Paralympics of 2012 since when David Weir, aka the Weirwolf, Hannah Cockcroft and many other disabled athletes have become household names. Television programmes have been presented by disabled people such as Ade Adepitan.

This is an example of how change can happen when there is sufficient momentum behind it.

Other changes include the legalisation of homosexuality, women gaining the right to vote in general elections, both in the UK, and the abolishment of slavery worldwide. These too had catalysts but also the addition of legislation to formalise their acceptance, and indeed criminalise non-conformity to the change.

Broadly speaking change comes in two ways; rapid via Revolution, or gradual via Evolution. Where the desired change pertains to an entity such as a system of government or a law, change can be achieved rapidly. However where the change is desired in a thought or belief it is often more gradual. South Africa’s apartheid history is an illustration of both. Politically apartheid was overturned when the freed Nelson Mandela was elected President and the ANC was no longer a banned organisation. Racial segregation was no longer a legal precept. That was the revolutionary rapid change, the easy part. However many white South Africans would have spent their entire lives to that point with the belief ingrained in them by the law and by several generations before them that they were superior to black South Africans. That, is an idea, a belief, and can only be changed with education, willingness, time and consistent refreshing to maintain the momentum of change.

Child labour is another example, albeit a more complex one, and addressed in an earlier blog. In short, in the early 1920s my paternal grandfather began work at 12 years of age in the coal-mines of South Wales. Children even younger were employed by and as chimney sweeps. His sons left school at 14 years of age as by then formal education had raised the leaving age. His granddaughter worked as a teacher, and grandsons both have university degrees, indeed the elder of the two is a professor at a prestigious university. This change happened not overnight or in months, but over a century. Contrast that with other countries often castigated for their child labour. The simple, albeit not only, difference is time.

Apartheid then as detailed earlier, is/was a manifestation of racism, a legal framework built on a foundation of racism. Racism at its core is an idea, a belief, and as outlined they are harder and more time consuming to change. A willingness to change must exist and be accompanied by regular catalysts to maintain the momentum of that change. History has had its catalysts; Rosa Parks, Dr Martin Luther King Jnr, Malcolm X, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and doubtless many others. Occasionally the catalyst is a watershed event; Rosa Parks created such an event, the Red Tails in the Second World War illustrated that – contrary to belief of the white commanders – black pilots were capable of great things.

Too often though the issue is highlighted in a negative fashion which serves to retard rather than assist progress. Properly harnessed the George Floyd incident should have been a catalyst for further change. It should have been used by both sides, and community leaders, legislators and others to come together to devise a strategy that would prevent its repetition, through education and legislation. Instead it has been hijacked by rioters and looters as a smokescreen behind which they can ply their trade, allowing the leaders and legislators off the hook, letting them address that instead of the real issue.