The Power of Hope by Kon Karapanagiotidis

Author:Kon Karapanagiotidis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

YES, WE MAY BE A MINORITY, BUT WE ARE A MINORITY OF MILLIONS.

11

HOW TO BE A MAN

‘You fucken dirty wog!’ bellowed a mullet-headed man from a clapped-out red Toyota.

The car stopped and circled back towards me. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon in suburbia and I was out for an afternoon walk.

‘Wooooogg!’ he taunted. ‘This is my country. Go back to your own country, arsehole!’

Just to make sure I didn’t miss a word, he had poured himself out of the car window while screaming at me and his shitty baseball cap had fallen off. I picked it up and kept walking, looking for a rubbish bin to dump it into, my small act of defiance.

The car circled back again.

‘Give me back my fucken cap.’

The car stopped and, while his mate looked on, the driver got out and ambled over towards me. He was brandishing a big metal steering-wheel lock, presumably to clock me with.

Fuck it, I thought to myself, and threw back the cap. I started walking again, hoping that was the end of it.

About fifty metres away, his abuse started up again. But this time something in me just broke. I was no longer that little kid in primary school who copped abuse every week and had to suck it up.

Uh-uh. No more. I was done with that.

‘C’mon then, you bastards!’ I turned and screamed at them, almost frothing at the mouth. ‘I’ll take you both on. C’mon, you fuckers! Let’s go!’

My heart almost burst out of my chest. I hadn’t been in a fight since I was fourteen, and nearly twenty years later, here I was begging for one. I couldn’t believe my rage. It just poured out of me – years of it, every racist slight I had endured since kindergarten. It was white-hot anger that had been bottled up for years and there seemed no end to it. I didn’t have any concern what the outcome would be, I just wanted to hit them – hard, and repeatedly. As I continued to shout, the two men got scared and – like all racists, who are all cowards – got back into the car and drove off while still mouthing obscenities.

Thinking about it now, rage and violence towards others seems to be increasingly more common. But hate begets hate and it consumes you if you allow it to.

How should we men deal with such moments? How can we do better?

To this day I’m still often abused and bullied, if in a slightly different fashion. I have more than two thousand names on my Twitter block list and here are some actual examples of what some of these men write to me:

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