We have politicians, and unfortunately they are the worst of us, often the worst people they could be. Just take a sample of them and ask yourself if they possess the courage of their convictions, if they serve their own interests or others. Ask if you could do better, think better, act more morally, if you were given that power? Politics is quite obviously the playground of the self-interested, not the selfless. A place where those that seek power for its own sake congregate to make laws that protect the property of their peers (class) and curb the freedoms of the masses. Politicians and politics form the barrier between the populous and the privileged, using the law as a force to prevent fair and ethical distribution of property, protecting entitlements created by those that centuries ago supported the winning king, he so anointed in the right of power by a being that cannot be proved. Said being, and it’s power, justified in existence by the words in books written by stone-age agrarians, those agrarians being the people who wished to be powerful.
I used to be interested in the environment, in rights, in justice, and now I’m interested in just getting by. I don’t lack the courage to speak out, I lack the forum and the audience. I don’t lack the will to speak out, but I realise I must keep a roof over my head. I don’t lack the intellect to argue for the things that matter, but I am drowned out by the rubble of what matters to most people, like the arguments over who gets to use what bathroom, whether Charlie has fat fingers, what celebrity danced the perfect cha-cha-cha, which low self-esteemed snowflake has overcome their own nurture to bake the best biscuit, which personality has had a little work done on their cheekbones, or even if it’s ok that the 65 year old Madonna is still sexual on stage. I call this rubble because it is that which is laying around being un-useful, it is the stuff of the conversations we, the distracted public, most normally have in the short breaks we get between labouring to sit down and eat a sandwich.
What is right remains right though, and what is wrong remains wrong. People who are not allowed to live with even the basic level of sustenance are given sympathy by those that throw out 20% of what they buy in the supermarket, and that sympathy is supposed to be enough, people who steal to get through the week are criminals, but those that skim millions in tax not paid are business innovators that employ people and so get the breaks. People who kill are murderers, while politicians that vote to send the troops in are leaders shielded from the results of the wars they send other people to fight. The world is fucked, and I believe it now cannot be un-fucked because it is too difficult to tell the difference between the right side and the wrong side in a moral sense. Is there anyone left to believe in, is there anyone remaining that has the power, granted or accumulated, to change the world in any positive way, one person that could be said to be a moral actor? Every attempt has been thwarted, every peacemaker removed from their position, every movement for democracy in any country unlucky enough to have oil under its soil has been crushed with the help of the greatest force the world has ever known, the capitalist military industrial complex.
It’s far too easy to see your country as correct in its actions simply because it’s your country that is acting, you have been conditioned by your schooling and your media and the echoes of your peer group to believe that that is an a priori fact. I grew up surrounded by people who scratched the letters U V F onto high school desks and doodled the British flag on their text books long before they knew anything about the history of the island they lived on, whose fathers marched in flute bands with orange sashes draped over them and so they marched alongside and still do in their adulthood without question. Oscar Wilde said “most people are other people, their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”, when I read that I knew exactly the criticism he was making as the same criticism Immanuel Kant has made when he said the motto of the enlightenment was “dare to use your own reason”. It takes a strong will to use one’s own reason, it is a revolutionary act to think for yourself rather than to seek refuge in social truths that are popular, but happen rarely to be true.
You don’t actually have to care about a mass of people, or a single person, to recognise that they have the same right as you to live and have available to them the resources they need to make that life more than a struggle for existence. I have no love for religious people, especially the ones I do not know, but because I hold a moral belief that they are my equals by birth, if not in any other way, then I see them as having the right to remain unmolested by another strong religious majority. It matters not that they have hooked themselves up to a false ideology, the cure for that will not be a genocide or a bomb. We cannot use violence to get people to agree with us, we in fact strengthen their resolve, we create the next generation of hardliners. “Do they not weep for their children too?” Tony Benn.
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