On 29th march, an activist released a can of worms that have long been wriggling at the bottom of NGOs’ stomachs - funding.
In response to a colour photograph of women’s rights icons smilingly pinning a badge on an ExxonMobil representative, wrapped around an article about their RM1.3 million in funding, a private rage was made public.
ExxonMobil has reportedly colluded with violent and corrupt governments, planned and executed environmental devastation, facilitated mass homelessness and the subjugation of women and flowingly, nation through the cheap tactic of sexual violence.
The two NGOs work towards a vision of gender equality.
There is a disequilibrium, or perhaps, too much of a matching dance.
What is left to be said of this matter? Women’s lives are still not as fleshy as the reasonable man, and human rights - even the voicelessness of trees - speak louder than the mundanity that is gender inequality. It’s almost too easy to dismiss the lack of political backbone in women’s groups; and at the same flick of the hand, private worms are cast a little further away.
The same careless gesture is narrowing the depth of funding that is available for women’s rights work. A slow choking that results in the desperate swallowing of corporate social responsibility as a plausible breath of life.
What can the women’s groups do? To reject the money is to be haunted by the gnawing fear of not lasting for another second. Phantom images of names and stories burn by one after another like an old reel.
“One cannot survive by principles alone”, the one who has starved knows in humbled silence. “All cannot survive by needs alone”, the one who has seen knows in
righteous chorus.
To accept the money is to allow the poisoned blood of nonchalant annihilation pulse through their being, like a parasitic virus. Tasting vomit clenched behind gracious smiles and the frustration of speaking through a severed tongue.
What does it take to make a good decision around change? I wish I knew. How thick must the glasses be before it can finally pause and say, this is as far as it can go before it turns sour with arrogance?
Someone led me to the modern robot called Due Process. Apparently, there are no definite rights or wrongs in this complexity that is our life. But the slick clinking of Due Process will ensure that all colours of ambiguity are smoothened to, at the very least, a legible sentence. Rendered pronounceable, understandable and acceptable.
But can the culmulative weight of heads nodding in synchronicity support the one head that cannot? Leaning on the very difference that splays all people apart, the processor of Due Process computes the viability of its mechanism through the sheer impossibility of agreement in the first place. And as such, should many agree, then it makes logic that it is the soundest judgment in today’s increasingly complicated moment.
Is it? When popular culture augments all thoughts to merely two sides of a mirror. When socialism versus anarchism versus liberalism versus feminism versus environmentalism versus development versus versusism all have their own sacred cows and sacred vows. When if I stand far away enough, or a little too close, I recognise our resemblance. Like test tube embryos scrabbling to be real.
What does it take to make a good decision around change? Can anyone dazzle with integrity so clean that it reduces all washing powder advertisements to tears? Is everything a tactical move; a communications strategy spouting public relations epistemology?
Or perhaps it is a question of mathematics. Playing marbles and adding up bad against good, as though it was possible to capture either in a pretty glass ball. As though the glass ball could be a television screen of a definite future. Measurable outcomes and indicators. So easy when it comes to naming others, so painful when it comes to planning funding projects and writing reports.
At least for me.
Maybe the mistake was a choosing of names. If ExxonMobil was merely Seng Huat Sdn Bhd, a baby violator merely dreaming of gross splendour in power, then the can of worms could remain sated at the bottom of everyone’s conscience. Wriggling until the day it could be expunged without embarrassment. It would all be okay. We could all sleep tonight.
AWID claims it’s a matter of perspective. Of placing women’s rights work as a matter equal to trees, and penises, and whale sharks, and people who struggle for a name, and profit, and development, and anything else you can imagine. Of claiming for more, as a matter of course. Of scattered dispensation of eggs into various, previously dismissed, potentially golden baskets. Of knowing what you’re wanting. Of believing in what is wanted.
I think.
I can’t be sure. The fact is, this is not an easy decision. I can hold it at arm’s length and intellectualise, philosophise, and generally scrutinise, but I find myself not recognising what is it that I cradle near my heart when it is so close. I can put on some glasses and sharpen my mind to think about the next best move in the immediate or somewhat distant future, but my sleep will be filled with dreams of unsettled worms. I can walk away and push it out of my home with a conclusive slam, but I suspect its stench will suffocate me. Or I can refuse to turn my head when it calls me by my name.
I’m not sure how to make a good decision around change. I’m not even sure if I walked after this question very far. It’s a messy thing, opened can of worms.