First of all, I'm going to say, not for the first time, how much I appreciate John Oliver. If you're British, you might not 'think he's funny.' Thank you for that. It was the near-total lack of audience response to his humour that caused Mr Oliver to move to the US in search of employment. He is now a citizen here, and a national treasure: beloved of those who enjoy a good, thorough 'deep dive' into civics laced with profanity and ridiculous jokes. Hated by people like the litigious West Virginia coal mining tycoon whose cases against Oliver got thrown – well, laughed – out of court. Somehow, suing a tv show for mocking you with a man in a squirrel costume just doesn't rise to the level of legally actionable harassment.

The reason I love Mr Oliver is that he's deeply passionate about making sure everybody in his new country gets a fair shake. In this aim, he is absolutely in line with the founding principles of this nation. Moreover, John Oliver will go to any length to keep people awake while he tells them what is wrong with unemployment insurance, or the pharmaceutical industry, or voting machines, or anything else that usually puts American audiences (and high school classes) to sleep. He'll yell hilarious cuss words. He'll make ludicrous jokes. He'll set off fireworks and insult random animals. It works: people are better informed because of him.

What John Oliver is fighting against is what I call 'everyday injustice'. A broken unemployment system that leaves people starving, particularly in Florida, which he calls 'America's vestigial tail.' Electoral irregularities. Racism in medicine. Local policing problems. The meat packing industry's cruelty to its workers. The problems of Amazon employees. The list goes on. There's a lot of it. It makes him mad, and he wants to make the system better for his American wife (a military veteran) and their kids.

The problem with everyday injustice is that it's pervasive, often hard to spot, and easy to get complacent about. Until it affects you personally, of course. If you suddenly lose your job due to the pandemic and then find out that the state you live in is making it almost impossible for you to claim the unemployment benefits to which you are entitled, and which you worked to pay for, you'll get interested in a hurry. Before that? You may find it easy to believe that lots of people you don't know or like are getting a 'free ride' from some mythical form of 'socialism' that only exists in the minds of certain tv commentators. You'll think the claim that it took three days of almost continuous calling to get someone on the line at the unemployment office is just a 'one-off', or worse, that 'they' are making it up for purposes of 'their' own.

This is not a new situation. It's as old as forever where humans are around. Nor is it a new idea in the United States that individuals can and should do something about an everyday form of injustice whenever the see it. This place was built on the idea that we could do just that. This is true of more places on Earth than ever before, thanks to the spread of democracy. 'If you see something, say something' is a principle more humans should live by.

Let me give you a few examples from the system I know best, the one in the US.

• Opposition to War: even before the US was a country, it had pacifists. They're inconvenient, those people. They really upset others, especially when there's a war on. And they're tougher than they look. A lot of them were actually murdered in the South during the Civil War – most of them by what amounts to torture. It doesn't matter if 'sometimes, you gotta fight.' Pacifists make people stop and think that 'sometimes' might not mean 'always'.
• Abolition and Support for Human Rights: See that picture of a house? It belonged to Judge Elijah Heath of Brookville, Pennsylvania. Judge Heath said he didn't care what the law said: nobody was being returned to slavery if he could help it. It costs him $2000 once, when they found out who masterminded the jail break. A hundred years later, like-minded people were riding buses and signing up voters…
• Opposition to Bad Decisions: David Crockett was a Congressman. He couldn't stand Andrew Jackson, who was the president, even though they both came from the same state. Jackson engineered a massive ethnic cleansing project that resulted in thousands of deaths. Crockett objected to this, and to Jackson's monetary policies, which he felt were unjust to ordinary people. When it became clear that these policies weren't going away anytime soon, and when he failed to win reelection to fight them, Crockett left the country. (Texas wasn't in the country at that time.)
• Siding with the People Who Need You: John Ross was 7/8 Scots, if you're counting DNA. He wasn't: he belonged heart and soul to the Cherokee. As their Paramount Chief, Ross – the fourth-richest man in the US – spent his life and his fortune helping his people get to Oklahoma safely, and negotiating a treaty with Washington. He died with his boots on.

I could go on, but like the guy who wrote the Book of Hebrews, time would fail to tell of all the good things people have done to fight injustice in the world. A lot of times, nobody notices, for two perfectly equal reasons. One, people think it's 'boring' to hear about good deeds. Two, and probably more significant, hearing about good deeds makes a lot of people uncomfortable. What, I should notice these things, rather than pretend I don't see them? Who, me? I should do something about it? That's somebody else's job!

Yeah, yeah, yadda, yadda. As Martin Niemöller said, there may be nobody left to speak up when they get around to you. But sometimes, people surprise you. Things get better. As Seamus Heaney wrote, hope and history rhyme.

The last week or so, I've been mulling over how incredibly old I'm getting. (I just had a birthday, and people remind me that we flower children have gone to seed.) But there's some good in that: I remember the early shock I got, somewhere around the age of five. I'd just learned how to read, you see, and I saw a sign on the water fountain that said 'Colored'. And I wondered why, because it was the same water as usual…. The world's not that place any more. It's not a perfect place. But it's just a little better because somebody said something. Somebody did something.

It starts with noticing. Watch for that everyday injustice.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

22.03.21 Front Page

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