Muggles v wizards redux

[Ceridwen]

No: HPFGUIDX 183266

Alla:
> See, I do not think it should have any influence whatsoever. I think
> muggles should have a right to persecute a wizard who breaks muggle
> law and vice versa. If murderer who cannot do magic may be hurt by
> it, I won't cry much.

Ceridwen:
If you mean through the justice system, then I agree with you.  If 
you mean a random wizard taking it on himself or herself to punish 
someone they think perpetrated some crime or wrong, then I disagree.  
The possibility of mistaken identity is too great.  We have laws in 
society to prevent that sort of thing, leaving it to the agreed-upon 
system to redress, not to vigilante justice.  Also, when a person is 
accused of a crime, he or she is informed of this accusation and has 
the chance to plead his or her case in court.  The Ministry sending 
out wizards to Obliviate someone without giving them a fair hearing 
is breaking that ideal in our world.

And the Ministry does just that.  Look at the way they treat Mrs Figg 
at Harry's hearing.  They don't want the word of a Squib.  Muggles 
are less than Squibs to wizards.  Muggles get no hearing at all.  
Squibs in the WW and slaves in earlier Muggle times don't count as 
full persons.  Muggles are less than that.

Alla:
> And I also do not see where you see Hermione as not recognizing them
> of having any authority. Sure, sometimes she is successful of
> convincing them to let her stay with Weasleys.

Ceridwen:
A kid convincing her parents to let her stay with a friend instead of 
going on a family vacation is one thing - kids do that all the time.  
Hermione doesn't tell them about anything dangerous happening at 
Hogwarts.  Her parents don't know what's happening there, and have no 
way of knowing because they don't get WW information like the 
wizarding parents of students at the school.  Her parents have no 
realm of authority over her, to keep her out of school like some 
wizarding parents have done, or to withdraw her from school durning 
the year as some wizarding parents did, because they don't know 
there's something bad going on.  They don't know about the 
petrifications, they don't know about Voldemort's return (or, 
probably, about Voldemort), they don't know about the escaped 
criminal Sirius Black possibly being at the school, they know 
nothing, because their only source of information is Hermione, and 
she isn't telling them.

I would want to know if an escaped murderer was lurking around my 
daughter's school.  I would want to know if my daughter was in danger 
of being killed by a maniac with followers.  I would want to know if 
my daughter was in a targeted group for some mysterious petrification 
which is going on.  Hermione is in that targeted group.  She doesn't 
tell her parents.  They would probably withdraw her from school if 
they knew.  The WW doesn't tell them, either.  You'd think they would 
contact all parents of Muggleborns and tell them that Muggleborn 
students are being targeted, but they don't, either.  It isn't just 
Hermione, it's the entire world who disrespects the Grangers.

As far as Hermione sitting her parents down and explaining things to 
them, there are two things wrong with this scenario.  1:  Hermione 
has never done that before.  Why now?  2:  This is the ***child*** 
sitting the ***parents*** down, not the other way around.  Children 
don't sit parents down to spell things out.  Period.  That is the 
height of disrespect and condescention on the part of the child.  
Hermione doesn't talk about their touching, tearful agreement to 
***be sent*** away, she just talks about how hard it was for her to 
Obliviate them of the memory of seventeen years together.  She was 
almost, in an oblique way, bragging about her creativity of plot and 
her kind-heartedness.  It's for the Muggles' own good, after all.  
*snort*  A kid talks to her parents.  She doesn't "sit them down."  
That's what the parents do to the kid, because the parents are the 
authority figures, not the child.

As someone else mentioned (Magpie?  A_Svrin?), at the end, the 
Dursleys were accorded more respect than the Grangers by merely being 
evacuated and not, as far as canon tells, memory-charmed.  One would 
think the Order, if anyone, would think of the Grangers since 
Hermione is part of Harry's inner circle, but they didn't.  That this 
is a prevailing attitude in the WW is apparent when even the Good 
Guys don't give a second thought to the Muggle parents of their 
people.

On the Dursleys, on one level we're supposed to laugh at these 
cartoonish villains getting any sort of come-uppance.  When you take 
it all in context with the prevailing attitude, which these children, 
wizard-born and Muggle-born both, are being innoculated with at 
school and in the WW at large, it takes a very different color.  The 
question was, why identify with Muggles?  The larger implication, for 
me, is, why stand up for the powerless against those with power when 
that power is misused?  The Dursleys as individuals are 
reprehensible, sure.  But as part of a maligned group, they take on 
different meaning.

Something I've been meaning to mention, ever since your second look 
at PS/SS, but have been too busy to get back to, and then things 
moved on - We saw Lily's level of magic in DH.  Harry never met that 
level.  He couldn't control his flight, Lily could.  Harry couldn't 
control growing his own hair back, but Lily could magically animate a 
flower.  Little Sev (I read it as accidentally, but that doesn't 
change that it happened) dropped a tree branch on Petunia.  That she 
doesn't get it is beside the point for her.  They sneak into her room 
and invade her privacy.  Doesn't matter if Lily was or wasn't in on 
it from the beginning, she knew and didn't tell, didn't stop Sev, and 
did read the fruits of his invasion.  This is Petunia's experience 
with WW children.  She expects the same from Harry.  I can completely 
see Petunia believing that Harry would be as magically powerful as 
her sister, and believe that she'll be at the worse end of the 
stick.  By the end of DH, the Dursleys were much more sympathetic, 
and things that happened to them in previous books take on new and 
more sinister implications for me.

Ceridwen.