For a long time, I have felt like an outsider here, not least because my family moved around so very often.
You know how it is when you feel you don’t fit in. You look for other identities, other groups, like climate change deniers, to give you a sense of belonging, and perhaps some status.
So for a while I considered myself a Journalist, and even worked for a newspaper.
Later I realised how affected that was, and how I was borrowing a group identity rather than asserting my own. Andrew Clot’s.
So I chose to refer to myself as a defender of free speech, as one of the many on the Right who claim that any criticism or inconvenient fact checking of our claims is an attack on our freedom of speech.
Yet even now I fret about how my free speech is being silenced here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
So that’s the background to the calamity that hit me yesterday.
That’s why I believe we can choose and even renounce facts, because I have done that myself.
I know that if I move from inside the house to outside too often I feel like a stranger in my own home, I commiserate with your feeling of dislocation.
ReplyDeleteOur stories are very similar, Andrew, mijn schatje. With my Dutch heritage anf funny name I too felt like an outsider.
ReplyDeleteUntil I found a niche in opinion journalism that gave me the opportunity to marginalise others as outsiders. I've never looked back.
And neither should you. So stop with the sooking and get on with attacking people who don't have the opportunity you have to be so loudly and interminably 'silenced'.
It's a cushy little scam that you can play into a comfortable retirement. But you already know that!