This thing of being alive is lovely.
Ordinary people, people like you and I, and especially the low income workers, who make most of the real wealth in this world, through daily toil: every hour of our lives is equally precious. And yet the largest proportion of the wealth we generate is extracted and accumulated and used as a tool to dominate us. The poor are a permanent externalised cost of that extraction process. I think of that as a fundamental and abominable insult to the very gift of life itself.
“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century."― Aneurin Bevan
The story of how life moved from bacteria to plants, to animals, to forests and plains full of living creatures, all the way to people singing songs, laughing with children as we play and learn together, crying when we hurt, seeing, tasting, hearing, running and sleeping to awaken again, and everything else that emerges from being alive and human and loving and sensitive. How lovely it is to be a warm friendly, loving sensitive humane being! No machine, no invention can ever match that!
Humour me, and stop right now - gaze at your hand, close it as you take a gentle breath in and as you exhale feel your hand and fingers, breathe into your hand and fingers. Do this again, and close your eyes, and then move, move your fingers gently, and feel how utterly strangely wonderful this ability to use a hand really is. Then grip something tightly, with all your strength and relax to hold it ever so gently, finding your lightest touch possible. Such a range of capability, such potential for finesse.
Isn't it amazing?
I do this and I think of the millions of years of evolution that went it to making this possible and I am filled with awe and gratitude. I am excited by this thought, this feeling. I think I did nothing to make this possible. How did I, this consciousness, arrive with this incredible set of capabilities? How lucky am I to be so gifted? Are we not truly blessed?
I am more often than not quietly in awe and gratitude for being alive, even though some days I am deeply depressed, or insanely angry, or confused or frightened, or just meh! A toothache is horrible and there are many other pains that are harder to bear, that take the delight out of the moment.
Justice is rooted in sensitivity
Nonetheless, I know that this thing of being alive is oh so precious, for me and for you and for every baby born, for every person who lives, every being that lives - and this, this feeling is why I detest the bully cult so much - how dare they (whoever they are) intrude upon that feeling, impinge on that sensitive life in others, and disturb it, taint it, trample all over it for their power, wealth and pomp. How dare they! That is the seat of my feeling of injustice, at it's most visceral. Before words, the feeling. Babies know this. Infants and toddlers know this. All young children know this. Innate.
The symptoms of chronic trauma are not a disorder.
People who cause trauma, who deliberately expose others to avoidable harms, are a disorder. People who expose others to chronic stress in order to accumulate wealth and power are a disorder.
Social systems that deny these simple truths are disordered. The symptoms presenting in people who have been harmed are not a disorder. They are symptoms, understandable symptoms.
George Bush and Tony Blair are disordered. As leaders or presenters or spokespersons of the institutions of competing militarised powers, they are a disorder. They are a dysfunctional psychology in action.
If they were indicted and put on trial, that would probably go a long way to helping all those harmed by their actions come to better terms with their lived experience, especially if the outcome was to prevent future wars. Most survivors do not want what happened to them to happen to anyone else, ever.
And for me it's not about punishing Blair and Bush et al. although I understand that drive, to hit back, to see that the person who has harmed shares the pain in some way - for me it primarily is about preventing future harms by showing that we, the grass roots, are willing to intervene and forcibly impede those who would initiate and prosecute war or harm causation. Holding them to account and putting them in prison is a matter of health and safety more than it is a matter of punishment. A warning. Don't you dare even think about initiating such action!
It is also true that to indict Bush and Blair is, for so many people, already too late. The vast harm they and those institutions they were embedded has caused is already done, and cannot be undone. Millions are suffering, un-necessarily. Their precious lives have been trampled upon and desecrated. How do we face that? What do we need to do to ease all that suffering?
The past is finished, the future is always unfinished.
How we move in the present matters because here is where we determine the potential of the future. That we recognise what happened in the past and confront it matters in the present because it must be done in the present, it cannot be put off until tomorrow, or the day after, or next week, next month. It must be done in the present.
Part of the difficulty is a general sense of fatalism. Part of the difficulty is that few, if any, will acknowledge that we live within a violent hierarchy cult that has caused millennia of harm, that is causing immense harm today, that appears to be on a trajectory of more harm into the future, we are led to believe by it's size and ubiquity that it is indeed inevitable, there's a deterministic attitude associated with how this history is regarded, how it is understood. Understandable, from the individual perspective. How can I an impotent single human do anything about this?
In spite of all that it does not have to be this way, at all. It is this way, yet it does not have to be, into the future. The future is unfinished. There are more of the decent folk than there are bullies and barbarians. With solidarity the odds are in our favour.
Who pays the price?
1. Externalised costs means that ALL accumulated wealth from industrial culture is toxic, without exception. In war, who pays the price?
2. Because of point 1. the bulk of what we call profit is in fact a cultural and social material deceit.
3. Governance of the shared commons implies duty of care which in turn demands an evidence based approach to all activity and policy that affects the shared commons.
Any activist that is not integrating these three elements is failing to address reality as it really is.
Poverty is a weapon system.
It’s an open secret that a lot of people in work mostly think poor people are poor because they are inferior. This is a core component of Industrial Social Conditioning.
"The Poor Will Always Be With Us."
That is a lie upon which concentrated wealth and power is founded.
It is also built into every hierarchy religion, it is a lie built into mainstream psychiatry, mainstream psychology and mainstream marketing. The only reason 'the poor will always be with us' is because the system mandates that poverty must be maintained as a whip that is used to keep workers working for industries that cause harm as they operate to accumulate wealth and power into the hands of a hegemonic class, the Ruling Class.
And for those of us who are poor we are made to feel a cloud of shame while the others are destroying the environment and looking down on us.
So the problem is clearly laid out.
Life is utterly amazing and precious, bullies undermine that at every turn, it doesn't have to be this way.
We understand it and thus the next question is how do we resolve the problem?
How do we end the culture of bullying?
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
