Shitting Ourselves 20 Deny This

Well, I won’t be frightening you out of your skin with tales of fleeing the family home after watching my relatives being battered to death or raped or shot; I won’t be climbing out of a shell crater with one leg and half my face blown off; I won’t be talking about having my teeth kicked in by a couple of bouncers or by coppers in a police cell; I won’t be talking about having to subsist on crickets and scorpions while I take weeks to find water or a place to camp where the same military and political atrocities won’t happen again; showing you the extended stomach of my disease ridden starving child; climbing the anchor chain of a merchant ship or stowing away in a container among dying bodies, just to escape a war zone; surviving with a new identity in a strange land, knowing I’ll never be able to see my family again, because I will either be hunted by criminals, shot, tortured or imprisoned; I won’t be telling you about fleeing from being murdered by my own parent because I didn’t marry a good Muslim man who’d been arranged for me; or telling you the mounting debt that I’m in because my arranged Pakistani wife used the British divorce laws to fleece me, once she got her citizenship. Nothing quite as dramatic but just as insidious, invasive and… frighteningly… closer to home. So, what’s the solution? Well, you should have a grasp of the symptoms I have already outlined (and I think you know only too well) - deny our natural instincts; deny the value of people’s everyday experience and making it readily available as part of our everyday social awareness and education; deny that this pressured socio-political climate is hostile to positive mental well-being and panders to prejudicial popularised rhetoric and glossy spin; deny that we are all being minced down the funnel of least resistance, against our better judgments and our human nature, just so that budget and target reports and individual Curriculum Vitae and the bank balances of callous people look more impressive; deny that we see it as plain as if they were Max Headroom when they lie to us; deny that we can moan about it and just hang our heads and carry on trudging the long line of fettered, swollen ankles; deny we have the antidote right here in our hands and hearts and just carry on staring at each other to see who withers first and whose bowels will give way next, or who will run out of shit to spew, if the universe doesn’t spew us out first. Just carry on the best way we individually can and watch it happen. Don’t revolt en masse. The governments have seen to that by minimising every legitimate form we have to do so. No… the revolution will not be televised because there will be no revolution. Even if we descend on Parliament and Downing Street and fill the capital’s streets like they did watching the Beatles on Abbey Road rooftop; the strategy of divide and conquer will prevail when we all return home and gape at how insignificant our collective outcry really is. Just what a brief slot it had in the national news and we didn’t even see our own face. Then we’ll shut our doors, turn over to Big Brother and grind our machetes in preparation for the ASDA shopping trolley job queue. Deny this crime against humanity. Suicide. Homicide. Global Genocide. The propagators of this crime will never be tried in The Hague. The grim reaper is sharpening his blade and the Global warming whirlwind may still turn out to be his cloak. Capitalism sewed it, ignored it and continues to fly in the face of it. That’s what you get when you employ psychopaths? They are prepared to take us down with them but what a way to go, eh? No wonder we are shitting ourselves. Obama says it’s time for change. The world has changed. Britain and the United States have led the way. It has become acceptable to shaft your own country and give even less of a shit about any other, and we’ve all seen how quickly people are ready to attack when they lose some money. If the financial market legitimises that hostility under the banner of self-preservation, are we prepared to change our values? Obama’s people say “yes, we can” and when people tell them they can’t they’ll say “yes, we can.” If they do that only under the banner of nationalism and patriotism, how much can it really change? How far-reaching is Obama’s positive influence and imagination? Far enough to reach and affect other world leaders and business magnates? I believe it is realistic to accept there is more to humanity. It is a testament to our spirit that we have endured. We have to practically restore and reaffirm our belief in that spirit, our common humanity, our mutual dependency and responsibility and value. We have to reward it, make it easier

for us all to tap into, especially in extreme situations, and give more incentives to people to develop and share those qualities. ___