What Strange Times We Live In

It’s been a peculiar time of late. The Big News at the time of writing is the fact that Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, has died. Opinions are violently polarised on this around the Internet, and I’m not here to start any fights or anything, but I will say that I err on the side of “mildly upset” about it.

The Queen, you see, was a sort of comfortingly familiar presence who had been there my whole life — more than any of the other Royals. Very little she did had any direct impact on my own life, and yet I still found her presence oddly reassuring. She was a constant pillar amid the swirling mists of change; a storm that only feels like it’s been building in intensity over the course of my entire life, until we reach today — a time when the whole world very much feels like it’s at breaking point.

The Queen was not someone I especially trusted, nor was she someone that I thought was doing a good job of “running the country” — as deliberately disconnected from politics as I have remained for most of my life, I was under no illusions as to whether or not the monarchy had any real power whatsoever. And yet somehow, whenever anyone complained about “our tax money supporting those royal spongers” or whatever the complaint du jour happened to be, I didn’t feel like I could get on board with it. Just like I don’t feel I can get on board with the people celebrating her passing now.

Because yes, there absolutely are people celebrating her passing, and even people wishing that she suffered. Not just weirdoes on the Internet, either — people who move in some of the same circles as I do, though thankfully not people I’d particularly call “friends” at this point, and especially not after some of the vitriol I’ve seen them spouting.

Regardless of your feelings on a public figure that has passed, it feels fundamentally disrespectful to spit on their grave in such a manner, particularly so soon after their passing. And honestly, as bleeding-heart as this might make me, I tend to extend this courtesy to the people that the world commonly regards as “evil” also. I didn’t whoop and holler and cheer when people like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden died; I could celebrate the reaching of a milestone in a conflict or a victory for the supposed “good guys” without taking joy in the death of another human being.

And sure. There are plenty of criticisms one could level at the Queen — though I suspect in the majority of the cases she’s more the one who simply rubber-stamped any controversial decisions rather than actually “doing” things herself — but I cannot and will not think that, in any way, justifies some of the genuinely horrible things I’ve seen people saying over the course of the last couple of days.

The monarchy may be outdated, irrelevant, useless and a waste of money — but she was still our Queen, and a lot of us took an odd amount of pride in her, and drew comfort from her presence. I am, by no means, what you might call a royalist — I take precisely zero interest in what Harry, William and co are up to, for example — but I do feel an important part of our culture has taken that big step into becoming history rather than the present. And things are never quite going to be the same again.