That’s how normal-and-boring all this has become – I didn’t register a week without an update passing (and ironically, this one is a day late, but only because I was a bit busy last night – it was drafted in time, though). It’s a bit more than just “normal and boring”, though – it’s the constant sense of all days being the same that is starting to grind me down.

I was chatting to my folks the other day, and we were saying there’s nothing to talk about, because we’re not doing anything. There’s whatever’s on the news, and there’s whatever’s happening with our supermarket shopping, and there’s anything nice we might have cooked. And that’s more or less it.

But what is on the news this week is that America is on fire again. The police murdered another black man, and riots have ensued.

I feel stupid saying things like #blacklivesmatter, (even though, obviously, they absolutely do) because I am a middle-class middle-aged (cis het etc etc) white man from the UK. And for all the privilige that carries, there is next to nothing I can do to help defeat the institutional racism in the US. There’s almost nothing I can do defeat in the UK, especially when I can’t leave the house.

This post is very nearly the limit of what I can do – to own that I have a pile of privilege, and commit to using that when I can, in the small ways I can, to ensure that the world is just a little less white-centric because of it. And I know that’s not enough, and so I remain part of the problem, and feel like I should not use the hashtag.

I lieu of anything more useful I’ve made the dontations, I’ve signed the petitions, and that’s that, and things will keep getting worse when Trump wins again in November. (I don’t have any optimism left, it turns out. He’ll either win, or he’ll be allowed to get away with declaring the election invalid in some way.)

But I write this in part because I feel like silence on this topic is absolute complicity. So I tick the box that says “I’m not complicit”, even though, in a great many ways I am.

Yeah, yet another lukewarm take the world didn’t need. Marking time.