When we choose which words to forefront and which to omit, we align ourselves with their power. Soft power: still capable of violence, not luxurious or abstract. With whose words and with which we chose to examine the past and the present will, inevitably, hold influence in every tense. From the vantage point of retrospect our choices can be made aware of their own weight, our quotes can be deliberate, perceptive. Or we can choose to repeat, in an endless play of imperial call and response, words which would deny us. 

To offer the benevolence of nature’, ideological transcendence, in place of material freedom in a time – like now – of extreme urgency for many of the non-white, non-middle class, non-cis-gender- male populations of this world is denial*. To remove oneself, one’s proud green country, from having played any part in that is denial**.

Denial serves in the maintenance of dominance, in the displacement of historical and political burden, in repression, deflection and diversion from threat. This is the ‘old normal’, the current normal – and until we choose to arm ourselves with more than the fragments we are handed, it will continue to be normal too.

*See: Wordsworth: The Prelude, To Toussaint L’Ouverture
**See: Wordsworth: The Prelude (Book X), The Banished Negroes, The Convention of Cintra