Helpless and hopeless
There are times when the tide of human affairs runs so powerfully and relentlessly that we are left feeling helpless and hopeless as events sweep us along on a course not of our choosing or wash over us, leaving us stranded in a past place from where we watch, powerless to intervene as history races away from us and yesterday’s bad choices mature into tomorrow’s catastrophic consequences.
Stress is the toxic product of increasing responsibility and diminishing agency. We are beset by media-powered causes telling each of us that we, personally, must act jointly with others to save this or prevent that, while media-driven oversimplification and hyperpolarisation erode our capacity for combination. We are told our involvement is essential to the effectiveness of action, while the enormity of what looms before us seems to preclude any possibility of effectiveness.
That the future is ours to make may have been largely a comforting illusion, but we no longer have even that comfort. The future is ours to suffer, as it is formed by forces that seem barely aware of us. We are simultaneously essential and inconsequential.
We are replete with promises of change and bereft of the ability to make a difference.
We are told we must tolerate the intolerable in order to make feasible a system that is inimical to our wellbeing. We are expected to raise our children to fit a society that is increasing unfit for them.
Our planet screams its pain and roars its outrage while we consume as if consumption were our salvation.
As you can probably tell, I’ve been reading the news. The word which comes most easily and most often to mind is ‘bleak’. I am open to the idea that the perceived bleakness is an artefact of ageing. Nonetheless, I am as sure as I can be that we are living through a particularly fateful time.
Our descent into the horrors which congregate under the rubrik of fascism seems inexorable. I am seeing images of black-shirted formations outside the parliament of a nation I once thought incapable of spawning such a breed. My first instinct is that this tendency must be resisted. But as I consider how it might be resisted, I recognise the danger that, in order to effectively resist, we would have to become no better than that which we seek to resist.
Who can doubt that the purpose of such a militaristic display is to intimidate? Even a small number of people can look more impressive when they are made to seem regimented and disciplined and capable of acting as a unit. This is not a rabble. This is a gang. The behaviour is a show of power. How might it be countered other than with another show of power? How might we oppose it without escalating it?
As I write, I’m listening to the news on the radio and hearing Donald Trump celebrating American exceptionalism with an aggressive braggadocio that immediately calls to mind newsreel images of Benito Mussolini and reports of neo-Nazi gatherings in Germany that cannot do other than make me think of Adolf Hitler and Nuremberg rallies. I want to understand this as the product of an overactive imagination. But it is too real to be denied or dismissed.
Am I crazy to see this? Or would it be madness to ignore it?
Unfortunately Peter we are immersed in a media environment where the Main Stream Media, which is largely privately owned and controlled, apart from the state mandated British propaganda machine of the BBC of course, seems to have little to no interest in reporting a substantial subset of important events or in interpreting them in ways which might change the corporate establishment friendly mindset that they perpetually purvey.
Many who seem to sense that this situation is in some way fundamentally inadequate go looking for an alternative.
Unfortunately many of them seem to be easily ensnared by offered 'alternatives' like GB News and the reform and restore parties.
We Scottish nationalist ought to be able do discern through the lens of 'what is important to US' that all of this is occurring.
Unfortunately the British cultural hegemony is succeeding in largely overwriting indigenous interests.
Similarly the global hegemonic power, the United States of America dominates the information space, especially in the English speaking and European contexts.
And in this era of decaying late stage neoliberal financialised capitalism all that is dominated by the overpowering interests of a manipulative and extractive corporate elites and the billionaire class.
All of these actors spend billions to create the communications environment that we are surrounded by.
Whether it is the constant ongoing psyops over NATOs proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, or Israels ethnic supremacist slaughter in west asia we can choose to not believe the shite.
But that takes some effort to find the people who are invested in not perpetuating the lies.
It takes some effort.
Most people will not make much effort.
Fortunately most people are intrinsically good, and societies are co-operative.
Scotland has always been a communitarian minded place, but the constant increasing hardships caused by 16 years of unnecessary austerity and poverty may be succeeding in grinding even that down.
I fear that Alf Baird may be right.
Scotlands people must either embrace our unique culture and tear ourselves free from this oppression, or we as a distinct culture may be subsumed, overwritten, extinguished.
The answer for us is Liberation.
It has not happened yet.
We can do it!
;-)
You are not alone Peter...there's a whole nation behind you feeling similar.
I think n4m3 nails it...nothing much left for me to say. A first class assessment by him.
I've been watching someone called Taylor Swift ..getting hitched and the commotion around a wee lassie who sings some songs ....unbelievable.....keeping people hanging on breathlessly while the luxury on show is mind blowing...they did give to charity...... a clever ploy to keep the poor peasants adoring them. All manipulated by the media of course ..as they do to Scotland's people....and have done for 300 years.
Just had a young engineer from Virgin Media to change over my old fashioned phone to one that works over the Internet..and a back up mobile ..so if the Internet goes down I can use the back up which of course is Virgin media's own line...so I rely totally on them now...not my BT line.(no choice..if you refuse you could lose your connection..)
We are manipulated ..threatened ( hold up a blank card at a royal funeral and you get arrested.. nothing happens.....but frightens the weans into line.)
News isn't news ..it's entertainment....you can vote ..a bit like the Roman thumbs up or down ..you survive ..you don't.
Listened to the orange looney at the end of his life still trying to trash the planet so he can make more money....And yet there are still Americans who think Trump is great....watched another heidcase ...Hitler...who only succumbed at the very last minute....while his nation was being hammered by the rest of the world...and still people adored him...
How does Scotland survive ..
I think of Shere Khan in Jungle Book ..when Kaa the snake is trying to 'bedazzle ' him (confuse him)...brainwash him..(intensive indoctrination..usually political...aimed at changing a person's basic convictions and attitudes...and replacing them with a fixed set and unquestioned set of beliefs).
...'trust in me.'. sang Kaa deviously...... The tiger lifts up his paw and bashes it firmly down on Kaa's head...'I've no time for this sort of nonsense '...says Khan .
That's my Liberation philosophy......worked for the Irish.
For OUR Scotland and her bedazzled weans.