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I’m sitting on the fence and it’s sharp

A naive, young, dare I say handsome fresher bumbled into matriculation one term ago, ignorant that this day would change his life forever. Matriculating was not as special as one may assume, like winning the lottery, getting into Oxford, or losing your virginity; it was an elitist orgy of self-indulgent pats on the back. Freshers roamed the town free from any consideration of the work about to be thrust upon them by tutors with no consideration for their social lives. Matriculation did not really thrust the freshers into a new world; it only felt like that to them.

Instead, it was a group of protestors outside who did the real thrusting, by persuading some among them to wear a small red ribbon to support Rhodes Must Fall during the ceremony. I’m quite fed up of typing in the third person so yes – it was me. Firstly, I hate to bring up RMF again. It seems in the last month or so the only qualification needed to write on the matter is a keyboard and the ability to thrash about manically on said keyboard and accepting whatever auto-correct throws back out at you. I’m not going to offer any change to that.

The case for RMF was very convincing – decolonise Oxford, stop glorifying the detestable acts of Cecil Rhodes and try to make Oxford a more welcoming place for BME students (I over-simplify). The protestors were obviously academically and intellectually superior to me. Needless to say, I was convinced. I wore my ribbon with pride and became RMF’s biggest fan. A certain amount of time later I was sitting in a pub, as seems to be the case quite frequently lately, talking amongst friends. One of them started talking about how RMF was actually really quite detrimental to efforts to make Oxford a place of equality. It denied, she said, the controversial history of the University and, should we remove it, would allow us to believe that no more change is necessary: that we now live in a colour blind society in which racial discrimination no longer remains an issue. To destroy the statue would be comparable to iconoclasm and an attempt to whitewash history. Shit. She is again cleverer than me, but she disagrees with the other group of intellectual elites I’ve already spoken to. What the hell do I do now?

At this moment I realised I was checkmated. No matter which side I stuck to I was woefully unable to defend my opinion against the opposition. I am topsy-turvy. I like to think life is a lot like Monopoly – I’m the guy who spends 15 minutes deciding whether he should buy a hotel and gets too excited about the chance cards. With my infinite supply of luck, I meander along, missing most of the land-mines of life and find myself lost and roaming in between them. When I decided that maybe, just maybe, I was on to a winner in siding with those that want the contextualisation of the statue, with a plaque. How wrong I was: apparently, being distinctly moderate is a way to piss off everyone who isn’t. Being moderate is just like standing in noman’s land with two opposing trenches flinging shit not quite hard enough to hit each other – and I didn’t even bring an umbrella.

Being moderate, highlights you as convincible to both parties but not quite convinced. Suddenly, all my friends from both sides of the debate come to me, more persistent than the Jehova’s Witnesses that wake me every weekend at home, because they know that I will at least hear their side of the debate. People are trying to pull me from both sides of the fence and I think my arms might get pulled off.

Instead, I then decided that I should just be passively uninvolved in all of it. Let the clever people talk it over and work out what is right. Once they have done that they can tell me what I am meant to believe. That’s basically what I’ve done all my life. Although I’m here to benefit from one of the best educations that the world can provide, I’m woefully intent on ignoring the facts. I’m one of the mindless characters in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian declaring “We’re all individuals!” when someone tells me to.

A problem still remains. Being uninvolved, if anything, offends people even more. Oxford is obviously very concerned with this debate and therefore you should be too. I don’t really have an answer to that. I would say that I have better things to do, but I spent the majority of yesterday watching Pingu and trying to work out what colour the Rad Cam would be most comical painted. To be honest, the underlying theme of the debate – how can we make Oxford a safer space for BME students – is incredibly important. Thus we return to the very problem we began with. I’m already worried that a lot of people, a lot cleverer than me, will tell me how this article is wrong in every single manner, and I already know that they are right. The only thing that I can say is that I have no strong feelings either way. My feeling of having no strong feelings is similar. However, not feeling strongly about not feeling strongly.

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