Dear Monarcy Fetishists

To be clear, I’m not talking about the people who are genuinely mourning the recent death of Queen Elizabeth II.

Whether you’re grieving because you were already a staunch monarchist, because you met her in person and liked her, because you feel like the loss of someone who has been present your entire life is one more instability in an already rocky time, or whatever other reason: your feelings are valid, and you have my compassion for your sense of loss.

No, I’m talking about the people who are using her death as an excuse to be Performative Dicks to others.

I wrote about this already at the link above, but if you don’t feel like reading it, here’s the Cliff Notes: There are many people with varied feelings about the monarchy in general and Queen Elizabeth II in particular. What you feel is not a universal experience, don’t lash out at others for what they’re feeling.

Everyone complains about traffic, and someone who isn’t from the UK expressing bafflement that people are queueing for hours (I’m not sure that the wait time isn’t more than a day at this point) just to stare at a closed wooden box from a distance has every right to do so.

Councils and institutions are trying to one-up each other over who is the most shocked, grieved and patriotic... by cancelling life-saving surgeries and cracking down on anyone who doesn't act suitably grief-stricken. Parliaments are going into a two-week recess at a time when they desperately need to be taking action on things like flood precautions (Australia, who just got news of another La Nina after two years of unprecedented rainfall and floods), or in the UK itself, the recent announcement that roughly half of all households will be unable to afford heating this winter amid surging energy prices and a rise in people accessing Food Banks.

Fuel subsidies are unaffordable, but of course the government can find an extra few Billion Pounds for a funeral and coronation... what do you mean the public are grumbling? Where's their sense of National Pride? The cuts to Public Spending will continue until morale improves!

You can’t even blame the new King, who specifically came out and said that his mother wouldn’t have wanted the land she loved to shut down to the detriment of it’s people.

While a Constitutional Monarch has very little power over the government that rules in their name, Queen Elizabeth was the symbol of several governments who did not support former colonies seeking independence. A Nigerian-American professor (Nigeria gained independence in 1960, in the professor’s living memory) tweeted from her private account, and has since elaborated that she felt no grief at the death of a person whose government oversaw massacres, genocide and mass displacement of her family.

Do a five-minute google search of British involvment in Africa, in just the 20th Century, and it's hard to argue.

A former Manchester City player also pointed out that many black and brown people (explicitly banned from working in Buckingham Palace due to an exception to the Race Discrimination acts that applies to the queen personally) have reasons not to be sad at the death of the monarch who symbolised and supported a racist system.

Just like you’re allowed to be sad at the death of the monarch, others are allowed not to be.

Everyone has their opinions, and lashing out at someone who doesn’t share yours is not a good look.

Personally, I'm going to spend the public holiday sleeping in, going to the movies, and perhaps picking up an extra shift for those Public Holiday penalty rates. Given the choice, I'd rather we not have it, but the extent of y caring starts and finishes with the fact that it's a day off work when I'm just starting a new job, and the training opportunities I'm going to be forced to miss.

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