The Postman: Collateral damage, the trolley problem and violent protests

Before I start this post properly, I would like to take a moment to complain about my morning. My family are super Christian, so we went to church today, and it was the occasion where the priest blesses Holy Water and everyone gets to take some home. On the way there, I was carrying a bottle of holy water and then proceeded to slip and fall on ice, breaking the glass bottle. If that isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is. 

    Anyway, complaint over. I wanted to talk today about a guy I used to work with, which, I realise, does come under the realm of complaining as well. But ah well. We were taking a break, and I was having a cigarette while sitting on the wall outside my university, who I work for, over the holidays. I was smoking and talking about Luigi Mangione for some reason, and the topic of violent protests came up. 

    “Name one violent protest in history that has been successful,” he says, dangling his feet. 

    Off the top of my head, I give the first answer that comes to mind. “The suffragettes,” I say. 

    He thinks for a moment. He asks me for a cigarette, and then changes his mind. He’s been telling me to quit earlier today, trying to tell me to replace smoking with eating Haribos. 

    He pauses. “Did you know a postman was killed as collateral damage in that protest? What makes the death of an innocent person justified in terms of political action?”

    I say, “The result. Women, without the vote, aren’t able to have a say in topics that affect their day to day life. Women died in abusive relationships, they died because they didn’t have access to medical care or abortions. Hundreds of thousands of innocent women would die if they didn’t have the vote.”

    “I don’t think the loss of an innocent life as collateral damage is ever worth it. I wouldn’t want women to have the vote if it meant that the postman had lived.” 

    Hello? 

    Silence from me at this point. We eventually hop down from the wall, and begin packing up some chairs in another room. He then proceeds to ask me, “What’s a modern cause you would feel equally towards as to votes for women?” I think, then say, “Trans rights.” 

    He then says, “So, would you kill an innocent person if it meant trans people would have rights?” This catches me off guard, and I say, “I don’t know. Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s a dumb question.” 

    He stares at me in horror. “That’s fucked, you know. That’s really fucked. I’m judging you right now.” I look at him angrily. He continues talking, “That’s fucked, you know.”

    We continue packing up chairs in silence. I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is that innocent trans people die every day, that he wasn’t being as clever as he thinks, that he was just asking me a moral question rather than a political one, one that completely wasn’t relevant at all. I just say to him, “no hard feelings,” and he says, “yeah. And I hope you don’t judge me for not wanting to murder innocent people.”

    Typing this out has made me realise the ridiculousness of the situation, almost like arguing with a right-winger online. I guess in the workplace different people are shoved together with different outlooks and personalities. The idea of the hypothetical postman fascinated me, though: a right-wing strawman. They’d much rather talk hypotheticals than take any kind of political action. At the end of the day, if you’re cishet and white, you can afford to care about the hypothetical postman, because you’re blind to the millions and millions of “postmen” dying every day. The trans people who never make it to the top of their waiting lists. The victims of hate crimes. Those who've lost trans siblings, parents, friends. Those who were denied healthcare for their bodies simply because those bodies are trans, and othered.

    It is easy to be comfortable. It is easy to complain about workers on strike, if it means you’re late to work or have to wait an extra half an hour in the queue. It’s easy to complain about the death of CEOs and to mourn Charlie Kirk because at the end of the day, “he’s a man with a family and kids!” It’s much easier to mourn the postman, or the hypothetical postman you’d have to shoot to achieve world peace, because he doesn’t exist. Or he’s just one guy, and this simple hypothetical stops the violent protesters from being heard. 

    When you make it a trolley problem, you distract from the issue at hand. You silence those speaking about real problems with fake problems of morality. Similarly, like how Rishi Sunak stated that “a man is a man and a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense”, all this has proved is that we cannot rely on “common sense” anymore. Killing someone is bad, that’s just common sense. But it’s not, is it? The lines begin to blur, when there are thousands of indirect bodies behind that one person, like the Healthcare CEO. You can ignore indirect deaths in favour of shooting the postman. Is one worse than the other? That’s the trolley problem, and I refuse to answer the question. I would much rather support my trans friends and siblings. 

    To finish this post up and to not end it on a negative note, here’s a drawing I did last night of Hobbes in a bunch of different poses! Love this silly little guy.

The many faces of Hobbes.

    I hope you're having a wonderful day so far! Talk to you guys soon.