Suicide Watch - The Diary of an Anti-Racist

by I Bismuth

STAR Date 6530993002.362083825051397 (See Footnote)

As I crossed Richmond Lock Footbridge I saw a smart suit loitering on the silly side of the railing. Its wearer, youngish, male and pale, was frowning at the river, and one by one was nodding out the seconds, a jumper on his final countdown.

“Good afternoon,” I said as I reached the launch pad. “It’s not a bad day, is it?”

The countdown aborted, he looked over his shoulder.

“No, it’s not a bad day—as last days go.”

“But the forecast for tomorrow is not so good,” I said.

Perhaps this was not the most tactful observation I could make.

“Of course,” he went on, ignoring it, “I have no right to assert it’s not a bad day as last days go. What do I know about last days? I have no personal experience of them. Like everyone else’s last day, this is my first.”

He sighed at the river, preparing to start again from ten.

“May I ask you a personal question before you go?” I said.

“You are not a man who makes a religion of minding his own business, are you?”

“I just want to know why you decided to drown yourself.”

“I didn’t. I decided to hang myself.” He indicated a noose around his neck. “Dangling from the bridge is a safety measure in case the rope breaks. I am a non-swimmer and my pockets are filled with rubble to supplement my sinkability.”

“If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well.”

“Indeed, and finding a way of doing it well did delay me. I always knew that life is tolerable only because at any time we can get out of it. The great comfort is to know that if the worst should happen, whatever the worst may be, we can make it better by creeping back into darkness. Come sickness or despair, always there is suicide lying snugly in reserve, a nest-egg against a rainy day of the soul. But never having given the practicalities any thought, when the rainy day came, I had only the vaguest idea how to get my hands on my death savings.”

“But now you have the key.”

“The simplest and surest method, lead in the head, was ruled out. Nowadays it’s not easy to be a shooter unless you are in the countryside, in the forces, in the police, in crime, or insane. So, as desperate research, I began studying novels, plays and poems whose characters did away with themselves, hoping to pick up a few hints. But literature was disappointing. I found too many motives and too few methods.”

“Well, when it mattered you did find a method.”

“Googling ‘easy way out’ would have made more sense.”

“Anyhow, you settled on hanging.”

“Overdose is attractively painless (with a gentle drug, naturally), but the danger there comes once unconsciousness sets in, leaving the would-be ender-of-it-all at the mercy of impertinent life-savers. It’s a pity quick poisons, like cyanide, which would thwart most attempts at resuscitation, are not readily available even to those of us who would use them responsibly. And with the less rapidly fatal poisons that can usually be coaxed out of the guardians of death (weedkillers, sulphuric acid, oxalic acid, corrosive sublimate, caustic potash) to the possibility of being revived is added the probability of a long and painful—”

“Come on, come on. I haven’t got all day.”

“Neither have I.”

“All I want to know is why you are killing yourself.”

He gnawed his fingernails and gazed at the sky.

“Come on. They are short enough to fit in a coffin. Why are you killing yourself?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to get into trouble.”

I find when dealing with an insufferable person, compassion is the key. Seek to understand the other’s feelings. Accept the other for what he is. Try not to be judgemental. Send out positive energy. Patience is a way of showing respect. Speak in a calm reassuring tone with the aim of never letting the other suffer a loss of self-esteem.

“I want to help you,” I purred. “No, not to change your plans. They are your plans. It is your life. I am here to listen, listen unconditionally, to help you explore your feelings, gain a new perspective on them. There will be no sort of pressure from me. Just let it all pour out. Tell me what brought you to this. It will all be in the strictest confidence.”

He scratched his chin and adjusted his noose.

“I suppose another minute of life can’t do any harm,” he said. “And I do need to work myself into a dying mood again. All right, I’ll tell you.” He swayed back to look up and down the pathway, almost losing his footing as he did so. Satisfied he could not be overheard, he continued in a whisper, “You see, I have these feelings.”

“You have these feelings.”

“Sometimes I can’t control them.”

“You can’t control them.”

“I—they—I—”

“You can’t control them. And? And?”

“These feelings, they are—they are—”

“They are?”

“These feelings—these feelings—”

His voice cracked and tears streamed down his face. He fumbled for a handkerchief, found one, and promptly dropped it in the river. Wiping his face with his tie, he took a deep breath.

“They are racial, racial,” he said. “They are racial feelings. Oh God! They are racial, racial, racial. Let me jump. Let me jump now.”

“When did you first become aware of these uncontrollable feelings?”

“It must have been at school—No, I want to die. Let me die.”

“It must have been at school—Go on.”

“That was when I first became aware of having them.”

“Do you know what was the origin of these racial feelings?”

“They came from what I saw.”

“And what did you see?”

“Diversity. I saw diversity.”

“You saw diversity.”

“And the more I saw of it, the more I saw what was going wrong.”

“So you gave up Anti-Racism at an early age.”

“Why do you say that?”

“When you were at school, did you imagine you were an Anti-Racist?”

“I think so. I tried to be.”

“And yet you say the more you saw of diversity, the more you saw what was going wrong?”

“I couldn’t discount the evidence of my own eyes.”

“So you were not an Anti-Racist.”

“Wasn’t I?”

“Anti-Racism is the art of not seeing.”

He covered his face with his hands. “I’m so ashamed,” he blubbered. “I am even worse than I thought I was. My whole life has been a lie. Above all I’ve tried to be a good Anti-Racist and, provided I didn’t think too much about what it meant, I could believe that’s what I was.”

“Recently, though, you did start thinking about it too much?”

“I did. I analysed the beliefs and loyalties good Anti-Racists have to have, and I understood my aim should be not merely to work for the good of alien peoples at the expense of my own, but also not to care what becomes of my own. And, you know—” He looked up and down the pathway again. “You know, the awful truth was, when I gave it some thought, I did care.”

“When you say ‘your people’ you mean ‘your White people’?”

“Peoples can be any colour they want to be. Many peoples are White. Mine, for instance. Ours.”

“Did you set to work to stop caring what becomes of them?”

“Straight away. I worked at it diligently.”

“And you failed?”

“I succeeded.”

“Then what is your problem?”

“I found that when I don’t care what becomes of my people, I don’t care about anything.”

“I see.”

“Is that as bad as I think it is?”

The breaking of unwelcome news can cause extreme distress. I recommend delivering the facts clearly and unambiguously, always bearing in mind the importance of minimizing emotional damage. Ponder the right choice of words. Nuances in vocabulary can make all the difference. Be subtle while not resorting to evasiveness and euphemism.

“Well,” I said, “the kindest way of putting it is: Nazi scum! Nazi scum! Nazi scum! Nazi scum! Nazi scum! Do you have any questions?”

“No,” he snivelled, “I think that covers everything.”

“I won’t keep you any longer. I am confident you made the right decision. Nip yourself in the bud.” I stood back.

He shrugged, patted his hair as if going in for an interview, looked down at a Canada goose looking up at him, gave a polite cough between thumb and forefinger, and then froze. For the real event there was apparently to be no nodding away of the seconds. I nodded them away for him. His seconds might have been longer than mine, so at zero I counted ten more. But at the second zero, zero. His neck was still unbroken. So unbroken was it that he started slowly shaking his head and gingerly turning around to face the bridge.

“What are you doing?” I squealed.

“I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to do away with myself. Will you help me back over the railing?”

“Just a minute. You can’t treat another human being like this. I have been standing here listening sympathetically far too long, waiting to be appalled by your drop, only once glancing at my watch, and now, without a shuffle of apology, you calmly tell me I have been wasting my time.”

He froze again, and for a nasty moment of unearthliness he stared through me like the corpse he should have been. I considered his behaviour decidedly odd even for a Nazi.

“Death,” he said at last. “The performance is cancelled because of death.”

“Is this the fruit of a loose noose?”

“Our unbearable knowledge of death.”

“You could just try tightening it.”

“Our unbearable knowledge that each of us individually will be the undertaker’s bread and butter provokes us to care what becomes of our people, a collective self we hope will live on after he has made a snack of us. It is an attempt not to come out of nothing and not to return to nothing. And it fails. Peoples come out of nothing and return to nothing too. The collective self is no less mortal than the individual self. The natural condition of all peoples is to live on borrowed time and stolen land. From an Olympian enough perspective, peoples pop into existence and they pop out of it. Now you see them, now you don’t. So why should we care what becomes of our people? After all, we know their fate is to pop out of existence.”

“No reason at all why we should.”

“I think there is.”

“You had better be careful what you are saying. This is a liberal democracy.”

“Stretching time instead of my neck gave me time to think. Now I see why we should care.”

“Time to think—time we had a law against it.”

“An Olympian perspective is all very well for an Olympian, but not very well for a human being. Why should we care what becomes of our people before they pop out of existence, which we know they will do? Well, why should we care what becomes of our children before they pop out of existence, which we know they will do too? Both questions have the same answer—because it would be inhuman not to care.”

“There we have it—condemned out of your own carpet-chewer. And this is the reason you are not going to commit suicide? You have followed a slime trail of Hitlerian kampfing to reach the conclusion that it is not immoral to care what becomes of ‘our people’? And I trust you hear the sneer quotes around ‘our people’.”

“I don’t know that it’s Hitlerian.”

“You do. I’ve just told you. And I notice you did not deny it was kampfing.”

“Look, I feel a bit dizzy now. Shall we agree to disagree? Give me a hand, will you?”

“Agree to disagree! That is exactly the kind of ugly suggestion I’d expect from Nazi scum. Agree to disagree with the likes of you! Agree to stop rooting out racism! Agree to find some place for hate! Agree to put an end to hope! Agree to let your kind make a living! Agree to let your kind be among the living! Agree to disagree! You feel dizzy, do you? Well, now you can feel Bizzy.”

I gave him a good shove and the world would have been cleansed of that ghastly piece of filth had he not made a grab for your diarist’s collar, thereby endangering this and all future entries.

“Nazi scum! Nazi scum!” I said as best I could with my abdomen pressed against some painful Victorian protuberance on top of the railing.

“Nazi scum! Nazi ooh!”

As I continued my struggle with absolute evil, two high-visibility-jacketed interlopers loomed up to pervert the course of justice.

“Hold on, mate,” said hi-vis one.

“You misconstrue the ooh! situation,” I said. “He is the one holding on, and he is Nazi scum. That’s what you want to stop swinging—Nazi scum.”

“You can let go now,” said hi-vis the other. “We’ve got him.”

And so the fools had. They heaved him over the railing and dumped him on the pathway like a sack of jackboots. He lay dazed and panting, but all too likely to make a full recovery.

“Bad Samaritans can do untold harm,” I murmured.

“Eh?” said one.

“He’s telling us what’s untold,” said the other.

“I repeat, this is Nazi scum. You are receiving expert opinion. I teach Sensitivity Studies. I know about hate. I suggest you read a text of mine I always recommend to non-experts, ‘We Are The World, Who Are You?’ It is published by Sunlit Uplands Press, is attractively priced in hardback, and is also available as a download for the stingy. While avoiding simplistic solutions, it shows how we can build a decent society only by ridding ourselves of Nazi scum and other scum whose commitment to the acceptable ever slips below the passionate.”

“What’s he saying now?”

“Slipping below the passionate.”

“I am unable to give you a synopsis. You will have to read it in its entirety. The subject is so difficult that what I have to say could not be said except precisely in the words that comprise my book, and to discuss it without being superficial I would have to write a second book, a book that could in its turn be discussed only by writing a third, a book that could in its turn be discussed only by writing a fourth, and so on and so on and so on.”

“Is he still talking about slipping below the passionate?”

“He is on to so on and so on and so on.”

“I hope you are proud of yourselves. Tell your friend I hope you are proud of yourselves. Because of him, because of you, an enemy of social progress is on the loose. He could get together with other scum and pose a threat to human rights. There could an outbreak of tradition. Who knows where it could lead? Scum socializing with scum, scum co-operating with scum, scum doing business with scum, scum educating scum, scum advising scum, scum looking after scum. Normality could reach epidemic proportions. Oh yes, if ever there should come a day when mind-owners are allowed to speak them, if ever truth is some defence, if ever freedom of association ceases to be the association that dare not speak its name, if ever the racial single standard should rear its ugly head, if ever professors of Sensitivity Studies have to find a job—you will both bear a heavy responsibility.”

I managed to land a kick on the person of the non-person to emphasize society’s utter rejection of everything he stands for, of everything he curls up in a ball for, chanted “Nazi scum!” a few more times, and went on my way.

I should add in the interests of meteorological accuracy that, notwithstanding my opening pleasantries (touches of common courtesy excusable in me before I knew the type of creature I was dealing with) and the implication they carry of unbroken diurnal sunshine, there was, in fact, a longish period of drizzle in the early morning.

Footnote on Diary times and dates

To avoid giving calendrical offence, Diary entries are now identified not by days and months named after Roman or Norse gods or Caesars or by any pasty-faced temporal convention connoting Euro-centrism but by STAR Date (STAR=Supremely Triumphant Anti-Racism). This is a culture-neutral decimal system counting from a zero point corresponding to the Gregorian year 1945. Each day or part of a day is assigned a value determined by how significantly events during it serve to lift the world to a higher plane of acceptability.

A STAR Date is calculated by first being aware that something is happening to bring us closer to the ultimate moment of sublime tolerance (if you think it is happening, or if anyone else thinks it is happening, then it is happening) and taking a reading of the core body temperature in degrees Kelvin of the latest recipient of the Remember-How-Bad-It-Used-To-Be Award, subtracting from this value the total estimated number (within an order of magnitude) of goose pimples raised on all decent members of society upon hearing the words Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, multiplying this by itself, adding the hallelujahs elicited by the Reverend Martin Luther King’s most throat-enlumping sermon, and finally dividing by the square root of six million.

(It should be noted that pointing out so-called “wrongly calculated” STAR Dates could indicate insensitivity and cultural bias.)

Posted by Guest Blogger on Sunday, October 9, 2011 at 07:14 PM in I Bismuth
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