Energy, potential, conflict, resistance . . . the lively daring of democracy that must struggle with the tendency for power to entrench itself and with a mixture of clever advertising, propaganda and scapegoating, plus the occasional demonstration of the willingness to use lethal power. Power and it’s paymaster, wealth. It seems that as long as we are able to maintain the fantasy that we too have the potential to become wealthy, to have a bigger car, to have more holidays then we will tolerate the increasing inequality, the crazy house prices, the victimisation of the poor – “they’ve only got themselves to blame”. So much change over the last seventy years on top of the seismic shifts of industrialisation and the consequent industrial warfare of the twentieth century. Where do we start to refind our ground. We no longer have a home to return to; we have a house or a flat probably hundreds if not thousands of kilometres from where we started. For a reflection on this sort of homelessness see James Wood in the LRB 20.2.2014.
Each morning we must re-establish our freedom: grab it, claim it, make use of it, live it. What sort of thing is this grabbing, claiming? Is it a fight with those around us, as though we have to steal it from our families or colleagues because they have stolen our freedom from us? Or is it rather an act of remembering? A remembering and a reconnecting? If we are oppressed by the multiple intrusions of real life, of overwhelming demands, of shock and trauma then we are bound to attempt to use our resources to resist: to insist on our rights to claim what is ours; to see through the barrage of propaganda issuing from government and global corporations. It’s tough going. That’s for sure!
I hang on to the value of writing even if at times I can no longer see the point of it. That must be what we call blind faith. The act of writing, like this piece, is one way of claiming that freedom. At least my individual sense of freedom and I also want to claim, that in that freedom there is implicit a solidarity: the claim to freedom is what unites us all in a solidarity. In other words I want to claim that freedom and solidarity and not opposed.
