THE NEW NORMAL
Learning To Digest Inhumanity
As many of us,
I’m deeply troubled by the present wars.
So troubled that many emotions previously settled
are being corroded and corrupted.
To me there’s a comparison being forged
between what I see as most people’s acceptance
that they can do little about the climate crisis
as they can do little about our politicians and political parties lies.
Hence they throw their hands in the air,
pervaded by helplessness and filled with despair.
Dare we, should we demand an end to the oil and gas drilling
and an end to the fighting?
Should we demand an end to the imposition of hunger,
and demand an end of the wars against children and women?
And meanwhile
shall we demand an end to the disgraceful privation and failing health
of millions of children in the UK*, 4 million of whom
go to bed improperly fed every night?
Shall we demand an end to us paying out of our taxes**,
huge subsidies on behalf of the oil corporations every year?
Shall we very closely question that in this century,
in this country with its huge wealth (in very few hands)
should we really accept it’s ok that people are made homeless
because of engorged mortgage payments***,
and heating and food price increases?
That family’s being made homelessness
is really acceptable to our civilization?
That its ok for nurses to work a 12-14 hour shift,
to rush to pay for their car parking in the hospital grounds,
and then to drive like mad to a foodbank
to get what he/she can for their kid’s dinners?
There is something horrifying about our capitulation
to what has become a new normal…
we seemingly have accepted impoverishment, murder, mayhem
and slaughter of the innocence,
but in the name of what?
An ideal, a notion, an ideology, a defence strategy,
a private economic benefit for the very few?
Or is it loyalty to a country’s supposed best interests
or in the name of a God?
Can we not see that we have been purposely disempowered
by the education system to only remember what they have taught us
but not to ask questions, not to develop a path towards critical thinking?
Can we not see that we have been dumbed down
by a corporate created popular culture
which day-by-day burdens us with misinformation and propaganda
that tells us militarism (the killing of other people’s children)
is something to be proud of,
that consumerism is more important than the well-being of our souls,
that we white people are inherently superior to non-white people,
that Anglo-American and western European humanism
makes us morally superior.
Can we not see that our horrible history of wars,
our enslavement of others,
our rape and pillage of other areas of the world
have all been in the name of offering supposed better goals,
better gods and idealised greed?
But actually all of these things are in the name of national power,
corporate wealth, often blessed by a religion.
Therefore the history we learn ignores describing who we are
and what we came from…
which is one reason why history, made inessential, seems boring to most.
We have allowed our leaders to get away with austerity.
This set of policies is their ideological farce imposed on us as a financial necessity
for us to make up for our sins of overusing credit to live a decent life:
continually advertised by the banks etc. to encourage us to spend.
They convinced us to accept the step-by-step dismantling of the welfare state
with the excuse that we,
not the banker-gamblers,
not the hedge fund gamblers,
not the ultra-wealthy gamblers
were responsible for the bank failures of 2008.
Yet we really seem to be able to accept that a child,
who has stolen a bottle of water,
should be incarcerated and punished
in His Majesty’s Young Offenders Institution
while none of the bankers who oversaw the illegal acts of their employees
were even charged for their illegal activities.
Should this be part of our new normal?
They control our consciousness.
People are now frightened to be seen to disagree with the ideas and goals
of the dominant cultural rules and regulations laid down by the wealthy,
by the news readers,
by our bosses,
by our unthinking narrow or close-minded friends and neighbours
who have easily succumbed to those pressures.
In the past, before the development of class stratification,
previous to private ownership of property,
when an individual refused to partake in the rites, rituals and labour
required by the tribe to survive,
to create its subsistence and to procreate,
that individual would be banished,
exiled, tossed out to the wilds.
It probably meant they would not survive.
Today, cowards use social media
to attack we who are intellectual and moral outliers.
The wealthy use their commercially owned media,
to foster public opinion along with corporate rules
and at times the law
to force individuals to submit, to capitulate,
to be subdued and forced into conformity.
And there is another cynical thing going on
behind the smoke and mirrors of politics, culture and the news.
The Tory party in the UK and the Trumpites**** in the US,
who have nothing but failure to campaign on,
are dusting our eyes with amnesia powder.
The Tories are denying that their abominable record on housing,
health care,
on the reduction of living standards,
the shortening of our average life span,
on justice and corruption,
on human rights,
on pride of place amongst nations,
have anything to do with them.
They are doing this by continually telling us
that those seeming failures were necessary
to reach this point of their ‘great turnaround’.
And Trump, the self-proclaimed saviour of the poor
but multibillionaire tax reducing friend of the ultra-rich,
claims he is the justifiable leader of the dispossessed.
The problem is that most people did not understand
the ideological underpinnings of austerity and now of price rises*****,
and by now have forgotten what happened in these last sorry years
of their back-of-envelope policy-fabricating elected
supposed servants of the people
(and actually servants of the party and the wealthy).
Where does all this leave us?
There is a way to fight back against inadequate education.
There are ways to continually confront our elected representatives.
There are ways to bring different groups and classes together.
There are ways to confront the social intimidation and the creeping Stalinism
which compromises are freedoms to speak and think as we wish.
And there are ways to confront the corporate and state control of our lives.
In the end, these struggles are about creating better, safer, happier,
culturally and intellectually richer and freer lives for our loved ones,
for our neighbours and for ourselves
on a precious, beautiful planet which needs our singular attention,
the same as we expended against the pandemic.
More hope next week.
NOTES
*More than a fifth of children aged five are overweight or obese.
Nearly a quarter of five-year-olds in England are affected by tooth decay.
Between 2014 and 2017 there was a rise in infant mortality in England –
disproportionately affecting the poorest parts of the country.
The UK ranks 30th out of 49 OECD countries for infant mortality.
A decrease in the proportion of children having vaccinations.
A rise in demand for children’s mental health services.
The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said the document
“provides alarming evidence that the UK is failing too many of its children”.
from a report by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
and see this from the Guardian.
**The basic UK tax rate is 20% on earnings between £12,571 to £50,270
The higher rate is 40% on earnings between £50,271 to £125,140.
The UK government was embarrassed into spending 40 billion pounds (of our money)on subsides to offset the price of energy being charged to us.
Meanwhile between BP and Shell alone they made profits of over 50 billion in 2023.
*** Mortgage in French (where our word came from) means “the grip of death.”
****On June 27, 1936, FDR dubbed the moneyed interests “economic royalists” who “governed without the consent of the governed” and “put the average man’s property and the average man’s life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power.”
***** In a boost to the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, the 16 UK and internationally based economists said change was “desperately needed” after the policy mistakes and failures of the past 14 years since the Conservatives took power.
AFTERWORD
One thing you can do is vote for the least worst of the politicians in the coming election. Get rid of these mendacious ideologues and replace them with politicians who are more likely to represent and serve we the people.
Even if they only do a part of what they promise they will relieve many from the burden of illness, lack of social care and the misery of poverty.