Final Blog (Oppression)

Virginia Wolf Blog assessment

Recently, the issue of oppression has been brought up to me. Normally, it isn’t something I pay a whole lot of attention to. Unless you have been ‘oppressed’ in a serious manner, or know someone that has, it something you will probably connect with far off lands and different cultures.

                For me, the word brings up images of Africa. What with various different dictators being attacked in the public eye, whether it be literally as is the case with Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, or verbally like Robert Mugabe. Not to mention the history of slavery on the continent.

                I have been to Tunisia once on holiday. Though I’m pretty the holiday resorts and tourist towns have little to do with the conflict in the country. None the less, I have an extremely small amount of experience of this area of the world. I believe I have never been farther east than Greece and that country has a whole different set of problems going on right now.

                So, when I do hear the word ‘oppression’, and these images of Africa do come up in my mind, there is very little that I can use to connect these images I see on the news with my Western life.  Last summer’s riots aren’t even that close to the types of violence and the causes of this violence, not that it matters because I wasn’t even in the country at the time.

                So it’s no surprise that simply hearing the word ‘oppression’ doesn’t bring out a powerful emotion from deep within me. However, if you go by simply the dictionary definition, it is a much more relatable word. Not just for me, but for everyone in a similar situation.

                “The state of being subject to prolonged, cruel or unjust treatment or control”, as you can see, the dictionary definition of the word has no mention of dictators or slavery. If most people think hard enough they could probably come up with some example of their own oppression. To some degree.

                Obviously the common feeling most people get during their teenage existence is un comparable with the holocaust during World War II. Technically, however, they are by definition the same thing. As someone with red(ish) hair, I feel on a much more insignificant level, what some people are still feeling due to the colour of their skin or their religion.

                 There are thousands of examples, on both extremes of the spectrum, of cases of oppression. Which means, that this is a word that has far more significance in our every-day lives than we would have thought. Which makes it far easier to talk about. 

                And just because the examples I used were, to put it nicely, petty, it doesn’t mean that our ways of experiencing oppression should be completely ignored. It doesn’t mean that cases of discrimination due to social standings are completely worthless compared with discrimination due to racism or sexism. It just makes it less complicated for us to understand and do something about.

                However, the type of oppressions we experience are far more likely to go un challenged than the ones we only hear about on the news. Because, when we hear these stories, most human beings have an inert desire to stop these types of suffering. They become political issues and take up so much of our interest that at times we start even more conflicts over them.

                I’m obviously not saying that we should ignore them, but I just find it interesting that the types of oppression we do ignore, we have far more ability to fix than others.   One of the main differences between the forms of oppression we experience and the forms we only see on television, is that we, as humans, generally find it easier to ignore the forms that surround us.

                Why is that? It most certainly isn’t a ‘one or the other’ situation. We have plenty of ability to attack both problems, we just seem to find it easier to muster the effort to try and fix foreign forms of oppression.  While I do believe that the more severe forms of oppression should be higher up our list of priorities, I also believe that we should far more effort in fixing the lesser, yet still very serious, forms of oppression that are closer to home.

                There should be a much closer number of charities dealing with the oppression of women or poor our own country as there are in a similarly populated African country. After all, the oppression of women, for example, happens in a very similar manner and to a similar degree of violence in England as it does in certain African countries. It’s just not as out in the open in England as it would be other places.

                Oppression to a serious degree can happen to almost anyone regardless of the country they live in. And no matter who it happens to, it can have an equally detrimental impact on their mental and physical well-being.  Just because it isn’t as out in the open in certain places of the world doesn’t mean that there should be an less effort to protect the victims of the same extremes of oppression.