Atrophy

I was considering writing an article about what life truly entails, what choices and sacrifices one suffers on the breaking of each day, however after having read about which celebrities distended stomachs have burst their offal all over a Mediterranean beach, watched what is to all intensive purposes some twats in a house, mistaken your own pitiful opinions for political discussion, and rearranged your collection of t-shirts with pithy slogans on them you find the sun has shit its rays across the sky and the day has already completely fucked off. I know from experience that if I sit down in the morning with a head like piss stirred up with a bad stick with the intention to work, I will inevitably still be staring into a computer monitor five hours later with nothing to show for my time except newly learnt facts about imaginary animals and an expression on my face which shouts “God’s Balls!”. Entertainment which is supposed to quell our boredom and free moments begins to push out and become our schedule, people organise their day or week around their favourite show, and other’s entertainment signals the passing and importance of a certain day in the same way that others might with church.

We devised these luxuries to improve our lives, and they end up becoming them. Having to stay up to date with the fictional relationship troubles of people in soap operas WHICH DON’T EVEN EXIST AND HAVE NO FUCKING BEARING ON ANYTHING! Yet you feel obliged to keep abreast of television shows and magazines and films and websites, when you full know they will never end. There will be no conclusion. No knowledge or insight to be gleaned from their resolution. It may be people’s disillusioned wish to create a sense of familiarity, a routine and stability to which their weeks play out, like the co-ordinated steps of troops, except marching in a state of increasing physical decay down an avenue of organ failure and death. Of course we are all going to die so how we manage the transient nature of time would not be a problem if not for the content of our distractions.

Even on the news between reports on the state of Darfur and catastrophes in China we are updated on the positions of some leg crazy vague personages, as if under the impression that any event or occurrence constitutes news. Where do we draw the line? Does anything which happens class as news? A tour guide forgets where he is going and annoys some policemen? Some actors in a new play are being stroppy? Dame Judy Dench trips on a light bulb? The news is surely there to inform on the complex interlocking workings of both international and domestic events, the waves of effect that chaotically change and alter daily life. The likelihood of news about a pop star taking illegal drugs serving your in the real world is remote to the point of being a fuck in a monastery’s chance, you are never going to interact with said person, they are not going to interact with you, they do not even care about you. Why you should feel personally enraged by the actions of someone whose field of interaction and influence at no point intersects with your own is beyond all rational logic.

The wasting disease does not just end there, there are of course the many many products and items conceived for no other reason that to create money and thousands upon thousands of jobs devoted to an item which need never exist. There are the things advertised as conveniences, while being only the solution to a problem we manufacturer ourselves. There are iterations and variations on a theme we never needed nor could afford to have in a world which can’t even take care of its starving. I know a person who I would be ashamed to call an acquaintance who has a fashionably large stock of at least four mobile phones at any one time, even to recycle or pass on or donate these items would not address the issue, they are still being made. Materials and energy and resources are still being flung into a saturated world. To say I hate such wasteful and ignorant people is not quite right, hate is a strong word. I need a fuck of a lot more than just strong.

Lines in the sand

Those of us who are alive in this world may no doubt be aware of the concept of money, which is currently shafting a great number of countries’ economies – the situation of one company’s imaginary numbers affecting all those it interacts with and ungluing the whole convoluted arrangement. This delicate idea is an evolution of the concept of trade, except now instead of paying for things with rotting sheep’s innards you get a nice incremental token which is certainly a lot easier to fit in your wallet. The premise is the same though, notes and coins being just short hand for resources, the sole basis for almost all human civilisation, infrastructure and order being these possessions. Property, wealth, resources, call it what you will but it is ultimately just physical matter. Matter formed from the energy created in the Big Bang; energy-matter, matter-energy. Odd then that people claim to own pockets of this energy, the argument behind the ownership of matter which was created by no-one for no-one is tremulous at best. It would seem preposterous to most if governments claimed possession of the atmosphere or corporations charged for access to their sunlight, so why does striding across the soil somehow give us the impression we can tangibly own it?

Lines have always been drawn in the sand. We take this diamond mine, you take the uninhabitable desert. We siphon off the resources, you pay us for the right to starve to death. The massive disparity between first and third world, king and pauper being fuelled solely by people seeing what they want and taking it, or even worse believing they have the right to it. Whoever is powerful controls the lands and resources, in the same way that those who have the power to enforce make the laws. When they lose their ability to enforce or their power to control then revolution comes and all that topples, laws are revised, land redistributed, resources rehoarded. All property is theft, you must take it and defend it. But even that is not ownership, that is default by shooting anyone that argues. He with the gun does not decide what is right and wrong, only what’s left.

It must be necessary to have possessions and countries and land and war, right? Animals have territory, animals fight, animals fight and defend territory. Well animals also lick their own bollocks and reproduce with family members, and one thing you can say about the evolution of humans as a whole is that civilisation, society and human group behaviour have changed in order avoid these kinds of environmental and communal problems. And that surely is the nature of human civilisation, rather than running around in small tribes fighting nature, the weather, each other, you group together and form larger communities which trade, share skills, educate, trying to overcome problems for the benefit of all. Is that beyond mankind’s collective thinking, to defeat inequality, to redress balances, to look beyond resources and money as a matter of ownership? Not just make one superficial gesture from our coffers which only plasters over the symptoms so we can’t see them as well, but actually attack the cause of the problem, the reasons why there are the poor and the rich, the manner in which resources are distributed and hoarded.

Of course that’s not beyond us, not mentally anyway, but people are weak to greed, bigotry, short-sightedness, indifference and selfishness. They have known nothing other than a world where money rules, the very cornerstone and supporting structure around which plans, ambitions and the future is built, without it life becomes confused and loses meaning before collapsing into a pile of horrible traits like sharing, equality and compassion. They see another nation, or religious group, or sexual orientation and they ask why they should give ‘their’ money to them, and even beyond that you have corporations, crime syndicates, arms dealers, violent governments and the incurably greedy who would sacrifice the lives and good fortune of millions just to buy a swimming pool in the shape of their own over compensated cocks. For them there are no words strong enough to be convincing, even educating people to be more mindful of others earlier on in life would be impossible when all those who make law are only interested in pleasing the voters, and all the voters want is to pay less and to get rid of people they don’t like.

Alan Moore wrote a comic called Watchmen many years ago in which, to cure the world of war, one of the characters builds a machine which instils sheer unbridled fear and terror in everyone on Earth, so much so that they all band together to unite and fight against this entirely fictionalised enemy. It says a lot about humanity when the only thing which would change our ways is the universal and unquenchable fear of death, although of course this idea is purely fiction, people would never be tamed like this is reality. Enough of the footnotes of history have been corpses for people to have learnt by now.

Less than or equal to

In this society all are equal. This may not be how some may be treated, they can be victimised or abused but legally all are entitled to the same liberties and freedoms, and they should be had regardless of how others deem to treat you. I’m reminded of this fact after a recent incident in which a hairdresser did not offer a muslim girl a job as she felt her headscarf gave an inappropriate message given the general focus of attire of a hairdresser, the event subsequently landed the employer in court under a discrimination charge. In my own youth I had an experience involving appropriateness of dress with my employers; I had chosen in my hasty and gaudy way as a teenager to wear a golden Kalashnikov pendant on a small chain (as opposed to the masses of industrial pig iron disguising itself as jewellery these days) just visible under my work clothes. My manager saw it as a wholly unsuitable gruesome symbol of suffering and death, as opposed to a nice crucifixes hung round the girls necks. Now I’m not quite sure what magical power it is that the almighty sky wizard imbues into these items which somehow makes them exempt from uniform, I fail to even see the reason why the thousand year old scribblings of a madman give certain people more credence for their beliefs than those who just believe independently, but evidently there is some valid argument why. Like fuck there is.

Secular belief, or what would be more rightly considered view, opinion, understanding; these beliefs have now taken on a lower order of importance compared to those who are told their beliefs by others, secularism may have historically always been considered subordinate but that was when society was not pretending to be anything even approaching fair. But it is now, in an age where equality is seen as a fundamental cornerstone of fairness and humane civilisation, that secular beliefs and atheist opinion are given second place to those of ‘faith’. And I use the word faith in inverted commas quite wrongly, they do have faith, in bucketloads, in fact that’s about all they fucking have. Certainly not logic, humility, acceptance, broad mindedness, curiosity, or most importantly knowledge of one’s own ignorance. But I digress into the analysis of the weaknesses of institutional belief which was not my intention, just a happy coincidence. One would ask, given the situation, whether someone with no religious affiliations would be allowed to wear a headscarf or an article of clothing which breaks dress code.

The answer would inevitably be no, but even if it was yes that does not wholly solve a problem. The person of faith, it is their position to choose to believe, to choose to follow, to choose to wear, to choose to express their self, and they are exempted from dress codes and uniforms in this manner. However it is not just the item that is allowed into the dress code, it is their free expression, it is their freedom and choice to choose that piece of dress; even if that item were to be allowed to all people that would not necessarily be equality, the secular may be allowed to make a slight alteration to their dress and might have a slightly increased range of things to wear, but they have not been given freedom to wear what they wish or what they believe they should. In this manner they have become second class citizens, not allowed the same freedoms or liberties afforded to those of faith, whose rights and reasons for free expression are no different to the secular, regardless of their history. This has not just happened, this is not just a state of affairs that has occurred through neglect, this has been endorsed, endorsed by a society who claims it acts out of equality no less. So it is in this way that certain items of dress due to certain fields of belief become exempt from rules and regulations (whether that be company dress or the legal obligation to wear a helmet), as have the beliefs and views of certain people become protected while others of secular beliefs have not. There should be no exceptions, or there should be exceptions to all. To give the few more rights and freedoms than others goes against everything a society should stand to protect.