Tuesday 26 August 2008

2003

When I was a child with the whole world and a whole life ahead of me I never, in all my imagining time, thought that I would end up, at forty-seven, with rotting teeth, a bald and strange head and no money. To find myself on benefits of one sort or another for over fifteen years, living in one rented house after another, and two busted marriages, three children and yet to still to have a dream or two left is surprising.

Born in a first world nation. Schooled in the ways of a first world nation. Lost in a first world nation.

I wanted to be on another planet by now. Literally. I knew this world would have a place for me to work my thinking magic. I didn’t realise that you have to be what this world wants in order to get something material out of it.

I should have chosen my direction to suit my needs of now. How could I though? I then thought that teachers, parents, employers of my future self would have at least some of my needs at heart. I wish I was taught that most people have their own futures to work out and that mine was not something that any of them was interested in; my life was my own to sort. My path was my own to find.

Very rarely on this ‘path’ of mine would I bump into one of society’s ‘real’ people; one of those people who, although part of the web that makes society such a limiting place, tried to help someone different from them to make a place that worked for that different person, in this case, me.

My mother has just phoned me out of the blue. Its her birthday today, she is seventy five years old. She said she walked past a shop the other day and saw her grandmother walking along, a reflection in the window. She realised it was her at seventy-five.

Seventy-five, forty seven. Her alive and sparkling me alive and down at the moment. One life each and both of us have had difficult times for chunks of our own existences.

She had two marriages. One with my father where she sired seven children which lasted for over twenty years and one which lasted a few months before her second husband died trying to find some work so that he could keep her in food, electricity and some form of warmth.

All seven of her children are still alive as far as I know.

How many of us reached our goals? How many of us feel fulfilled? How many of us feel we have lived our lives to the fullest capacity that it is capable of having regarding a life on planet earth?

I feel wasted. Like I have lived so little of what could have been possible.

Watching the airliners fly into the world trade centre towers on September 11th 2001, one of my brothers birthdays, was like watching something happen that I knew had to happen.

Why? Because you can’t keep building a world to suit one group and expect the rest of the world to just keep taking it.

Yet, the World Bank, the United Nations, The World Health Organisation and many other leading organisations seem to be saying that they all want to change things for the better and to change them now rather than later.

Do they really want change now? Isn’t it possible that the change is being forced upon them by the tides of change? Too many people becoming very aware that there is too great a disparity between those with and those without?

Millions die each year because of lack of resources. Millions live limited lives of limited dreams because of limited resources.

Millions spent each year on ‘things’ that waste resources, the dome in London being one easy example. (Or is it wasted?)

Food thrown out by the thousand tonne each week in this country alone; sell-by dates (and the threat of litigation) make skipping this food a better proposition than letting any of it go to the needy and the wanting.

Clothing, furnishing, household effects of all kind buried in landfill sites rather than being moved on to those who would find a use for them.

We live in a country of drugs and drink and serious boredom. TV replaces conversation. Music is loud enough to fill the head and stop the thinking.

When the drugs, drink, and boredom aren’t there then sectarian, biased, myopic thinking, the same that comes with organised religion, seems to be the other offering for those who want something different.

With both of these alternatives there come the lies and sadness.

There is the other side. The side of those that own most of this world. Those who are so right they can never be shown to be wrong without major upset. (Such bitter sounding words!)

The war lobbyists. The fundamentalists. The right-wingers, the left-wingers. So many different, but fundamentally the same, groups. All with power - all needing to keep power for as long as possible.

So the world gets better slower than maybe it could. People die by the millions through lack of millions, people spend millions on ‘things’ rather than on those people who would love to live before they die.

I am dying like everyone else; I have a brain that is, supposedly, a powerful one.

From what I can see, my future is going to be one where I might be allowed to join in and reap some of the benefits of living in a first world, capitalist, materialist society. Alternatively, I am going to carry on getting older and more rickety until, one day I end up dead with little or nothing to show my passing. Or something else.

Why should I blame the society around me and not myself? Why is it not just me alone that has failed to fulfill my own potential? Why can't it be that what I am is my full potential?

Because it doesn’t feel like it by a long shot. I feel the need to add rather than just drift through.

I want the events of my life, the happenings and learnings, to have more than just some simple point to a pointless end of me.

The funny thing is that most of the people I have talked to over the years of my life also want something more than just the little that society allows them. Not out of greed but out of belief that they have more to offer if only they could find out the paths that lead to the better use of who they are.

What a way to run a world full of unique thinking creatures. A creative explosion damped down by the fears of those who do not want to lose their places in a world built on past conquests and power struggles. A world with
a future that is already defined in the minds of those who control.

Time to change things so I can live a fuller end of life than the beginning has been.

Time to add the means-to-live to more people, even if it means that I might die sooner (from fits if nowt else!); because I have pushed myself too far and earned the ending due to those who seem to want change that swims against a tide set in motion by the gravities of those bodies who load the dice in favour of themselves.

? phew!!!!

got that of my chest!


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