Time is up

For long the silence was considered as consent, but it never was. No matter, now we have words, and more. They are written, they are said with calm and quiet, and they are yelled. We have all of it, to imagine, to see, to feel enraged, and now we must act.

We are at a moment when no one can stop us from speaking, and so they hope to discredit what you say, who you are and what you do. There are doubts, there are questions and there is blatant gaslighting, but your voice holds truth, and time might take lives, it might heal, but it cannot erase what happened.

Maybe we will not be afraid any more to speak and let abusers get away with being open secrets whispered to one another. There is no shame in having faced abuse- there are scars, and memories we wish to bury, but there’s no more a need to be afraid to speak up if we choose to speak up. The abusers fear their names being mentioned and tagged, live in dread of being a bad headline, years and years of careful constructed and curated image can now crumble in a matter of seconds.

Religion and politics have long been entwined with abuse. Power allows abuse, and uses it as a tool to enforce itself and claim humans as property and territory. And those who have enjoyed the benefits of power will refuse to speak out and condemn. To deny a person their rights, it first requires you to rob them of their humanity, and if you are one of those who do, your time is up.

If you believe every person is entitled to their right, to their body and consent to what happens to them or what they wish to engage, then you need to speak up. If the identity you are born into comes with power, as mine does, then it is even more imperative you speak up, else you are complicit with those who abuse. If I cannot speak up and question the basis for the discrimination and abuse, then I am complicit with the abusers of power.

So, I ask, which God do you worship(or what’s in your consciousness) that allows you to see another human as any lesser than you? On what basis do you claim to be superior or better than anyone? What is it have done to deserve the privileges and use it to hurt others more?  What is that makes you think that abuse—sexual, physical, mental—is your right and you should get away with it?

We are at crossroads where those who have known an old familiar world where cis-het-men were on top of the food chain now find themselves in a world where people can be themselves and speak up for their rights and what is theirs. And they speak out loud and clear. In the street, on social media, anywhere where they can be heard, and heard they will be.

It is a bad time to be an abuser of any sort. Fear and run, but you cannot hide, for we see you for what you are. We may have admired your work and praised you and loved you, but no more. A mind that doesn’t recognise consent lacks the aesthetic to paint our eutopia, to write our liberation or create a movie with our hopes and dreams.

We owe our future a world of consent and equality. This doesn’t mean teaching our children just about good touch-bad touch, and rush through the chapter on reproduction in school, but to talk about consent. Consent cannot be coerced, consent cannot be implicit, and consent cannot be extracted with power.

No means no.

Time is up.