An introduction to the poem- The We of relinquished responsibility
For me, a consequence of lockdown has been the increased focus and attention given to the everyday; to words, actions and intentions. Children do this naturally it appears, until asked to do something. My eight old observes my every action with intense scrutiny. I am treated to a daily tirade of questions asking why I said this, or why my face looks like that. She hears exacerbated swears uttered under my breath from rooms away yet she does not hear a present and directed request to put her socks on, very odd! I have noticed my husband is very fond of the word we. “We should do something about this”, he says with regularity, to signal his acknowledgement that an action needs to be taken, without actually doing anything about it. I have begun to call this The we of relinquished responsibility. I wanted to explore this We a little deeper. Author George Marshall, an expert in communicating climate breakdown, calls it the bystander we or the slippery we.
When looking at inauguration speeches, Marshall observed that President George Washington said we once, Jefferson, ten times, John F Kennedy, twenty nine times and Barak Obama used We fifty-seven times! Marshall argues that the repeated use of the pronoun is problematic- ‘a rhetorical gambit that sounds inclusive and assertive but is actually ambiguous and often meaningless’. (1) As lockdown has forced us inwards, I had begun to share Marshall’s sentiments on this word, although I had been unable to express my musings as articulately. I did, however, write a short poem, inspired by Marshall’s critique of the political We. So here it is-
The We of Relinquished Responsibility-
Who are we?
Who we are matters, you see
It’s the difference between action and apathy
The private we
The political we
A word overused
To imbue agency
Spectacle over substance
That’s your we
The we of relinquished responsibility
Notes:
(1) George Marshall, Don’t even think about it- Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change.
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