Give up?

Are you being Served, Saved, Starved, Abused or used?

As I reach the time of my life where, ‘That land of lost content’ looms ever closer, and I imagine a large billboard sign that warns; ‘It is now necessary to exchange your brain for a corn flake, all ye that wish to partake in our present society,’ I am filled with the dread of unbelief that we have come to such a intellectually and morally bankrupt place.

The vast numbers of people being cloned off to cul-de-sac prisons of despair, where doom mantras are constantly recited, ‘That’s the way it is, you can’t change it!’ leave me with an indescribable hernia of the ear drum.

I am pig sick of people who say, ‘If you can’t beat em join em’.  The current mindset of political fatigue and despair has reached epidemic proportions. We have entered a nether land of submissiveness. My friend Stephen has written a blog where he talks about; ‘Eating the apple of thinking for yourself,’’ how right he is. We are being overtaken by a blind acceptance; we are being conditioned to accept a militarized society, a society where people do what they are supposed to do because they believe they have no choice.

Everything in our present society has a hidden cost. Lets look at consumerism, ‘Are you being served?’ It is as if we have all been conditioned to expect ‘excellent service,’ no matter what cost is being experienced by the people who work in those service industries.

I was recently standing in a queue at a petrol station, there were two people serving behind the counter and they just could not cope with the number of customers. They were being treated to the worst kind of verbal abuse through absolutely no fault of their own, the dark side of human nature exhibiting ‘I want service’.

We have people on a minimum wage (And below) that can’t earn enough to feed themselves. People being ‘Saved’ by stabbing their competitors in the back and climbing the greasy pole of career.

The “paternal criminals” are the ones that run this present society, abusing and using the dis-empowered and the weak. Is there no hope of change?

It is my contention that all real change starts with the local community, I prefer to call it radical community. Once you have a rock solid community saying ‘No’ as effectively as governments and politicians say, ‘Yes,’  then we are really in with a chance.

Rosa Parks who in 1955 refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, fired the belly of the Civil rights movement in America. One lone woman saying ‘No’ changed a country.

Tomorrow millions of people in this Country will endure misery in the workplace, minimal care in residential nursing homes, abuse in the family because we have lost a common humanity and solidarity.

There is a way to change things, it starts with me and you saying ‘No’.

3 thoughts on “Give up?”

  1. David,

    Apart from the boom period (1950’s) of Harold Macmillan’s,“you’ve never had it so good” famed slogan, I don’t know of a time when the working classes have not been shit upon from a great height?
    However, even through that mirage period of the 50’s there was disempowerment. If Derek Bentley had been able to afford a good professional lawyer, would he have hung?
    Miners being sent down unsafe shafts. Unrecorded bullying in the work place, women treated like second class citizans, corruption in the metropolitan police (see –
    http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2008/…/soho-and-the-fall-of-the-dirty-sq
    The ruling class had it all sown up.
    The people from whose ranks I come from have never had their story told, in reality and truth. Jesus spoke about those who have ‘ears to hear’. I am calling to those who have ‘ears to hear’.
    Magna Carta may have its place but, in the words of Lincoln, “A lot of men rob you with a fountain pen”.

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