Dear Oscar,

I hope you enjoyed my recent epic poem;  it was a labour of love some time ago, and I felt keenly that it should be aired.  I appreciate the time you were willing to give to it.  All rather introspective and difficult to follow, I know, but that’s me for you – rather difficult to follow but well worth the effort with the multitudinous rewards that can be gained!  I continue, as you know, to question shared perceptions of reality, on all sorts of issues, and to keep on occupying a position of opposition to mose established tropes – particularly around the rule bound societies that ordain how we as individuals are to live our lives.  Now I know that things have changed drastically through the centuries, and that you yourself witnessed some of those changes, but essentially versions of the status quo keep on trying to reassert themselves and power is retained in the hands of a limited few.  You poked a finger at the seat of power, pinched its bottom with ribald wit and caricature – and look, dear Oscar, where that got you!

I am hoping I will fair better.  I am living a life of relative seclusion, and am therefore not open to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in quite the same way you were – not yet at least.  This is my very first foray into any form of public declaration, and to date I have not courted fame and notoriety in the ways that you did.  Not that there has been no impact.  Of course I have operated within the confines of my own society for many years, and at several junctures have found myself having to make choices which either uphold or challenge the modus operandi.  Where there was a choice, then I made a choice, but of course on many occasions my choices were actually dictated by the society around me, and therefore limited in their scope.  I could do x or y, both of which may have been unpalatable to me, but neither of which could be avoided, unless I wished to place my liberty and well-being at stake.  That is how serious making a choice can sometimes be;  you can stand in defiance of some movement or other, some dictate which is unquestionably wrong in your own mind, some person even who grabs power for themselves and then abuses it, but then there will be consequences, and sometimes they can be dire.  We have seen it over and over again.  You must have seen it too, although I get the impression that in your time there were not really the means of mass dissemination of facts and materials, uncontrolled by corporation or state, so that merely hearing about things must have been difficult.

In our age we are besieged by information, and some of it we accept and some of it we reject.  We are influenced one way or the other by the dominant mores, and every now and again we may exercise our right to choose, if choice, itself, is actually available to us.

All I know, Oscar dear, is that you were treated most unjustly, and that it is that legacy of injustice which still to some greater and lesser extent holds sway, in varying ways, across the entire globe.

In this day and age I have some pride in who I am allowed to be, but I am well aware that it is allowed to me, it is not a given.

Best wishes to you, despite your levels of ongoing castigation,

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.