Tired Of It All
I'm tired of this world, of the way it doesn't seem to change, tired of the false promises of improvement that don't seem to filter through. Perhaps I'm missing a generational aspect, but it feels as if the opportunity for things to get better skips blithely through a meadow of fantasy, while in the real world we remain shackled to the Machine, the System, as surely as one of the poor souls chained to the Manometer in Metropolis. A friend has assured me that generally things are improving, quoting Hans Rosling as an inspiration for this view, but warning that humans are woefully poor at staying kept up to date, often quoting statistisc that are decades out of date to justify their pessimism.
It's possible that I'm doing just that. I don't know, and I must ask you to bear with me.
You see, this was going to be a long screed of things that I'm tired of, ranging from feeling as if I'm out of place, and as if I have to hide who I really am in order to be acceptable, all the way to being tired to the way things are dumbed down, and we reach for terms that are so general that they can mean anything (Man and Woman being the biggest "blobs" - to coopt the language of the enemy - in existence and words that mean everything from people with different genitalia, to describing entire systems of thought and prioritising). Remembering Rosling's work has shoved me onto a slightly different mental track, because he might be right. Things might be getting better, both in terms of access to things like sanitation and education, but also in generational terms. I'm told Generations Y and Z are so accepting of LGBTQQIAA its effectively a non issue. I hope that's true, but being an old, hoary, Xennial, I'm not really convinced. From what I see, the "blobs" remain intact, and I don't know that that's changing. If anything the divisions in our society seem to be more entrenched at the moment, exploited by those in power so that the Kyriarchy can remain intact. It's all Hegemony, even if Gramsci didn't envisage it that way.
The problem, as I see it, is that we've been shuffled into silos, and we don't see the whole picture (as a species, I mean) only our specific slice of it. One thing I was struck by with the Black Lives Matter protests is that though they're happy to focus on historical slavery, they don't seem to care, particularly, about slavery in the modern world. Of course, this might be because its largely invisible. In the Developed World, it exists just round the corner, on dodgy building sites and out on the coast, picking cockles, or in brothels and "massage parlours" with trafficked women you can rape for the right price. Out beyond Europe and America, of course, the picture is different, with companies feeling happy to use slaves in Developing World countries in many situations: like these corporations.
I realise historical slavery is problematic, though for me there's a real problem in finding Britons from the past who haven't been unpleasant in some aspect of their lives: perhaps we should go back to Edward the Confessor, Alfred the Great, and Ethelfleda, the Lady of Mercians, to find heroes for our new age. Though, that being said, Thralls were a common feature of Saxon society... so perhaps not. I just think that being blind to the modern exploitation of people, from using slaves, many of them children, to premises being unsafe, in our modern, global, economy, is a bit like complaining about factory farming conditions while signing a free trade agreement with the USA that will allow them to flood the market with chlorinated chicken, and potentially worsen the conditions of animals kept on farms in the UK. Unless we are taking practical action to improve the things we can, all our highly held principles mean nothing. Of course, that means being aware, and being willing to give up things that are made in exploitative situations, be they phones, or chocolates, or video games (which aren't technically made by slaves, but the idea that video game designers have to work long, unpaid, hours to complete the product could be seen as a form of slavery as well as a sign the video game industry is unsustainable).
Yes, the world, through the media, has allowed those things to become largely invisible, as has the exploitation of celebrities to serve as distractions. Yes, we are all hooked on the news cycle, unless we choose to ignore the world altogether, but that only grants us a superficial view of the rest of the world, promoting shallow thinking. We overlook the way issues become bundled together, poverty becoming both a cause, and a justification, for racism across the Developed World, and as I've noted before, positive racism remains invisible. Yes, it is racist to emphasise the Martial Arts aspect of Asian culture to the extent that almost every Asian led TV show is based on Kung Fu. It was racist in the 1970s, when this was recorded, and its racist now! The same is true when we talk about the supposedly larger penises of Black men because it treats them as something to be objectified and fetishized, and emphasises the idea they're somehow beastlike, because animals like horses are always depicted as having large penises too. Just because it might seem complimentary, doesn't mean it actually is. The same might be said for a lot of gay stereotypes, they seem complimentary in many cases, but they really aren't. These concepts must be discarded, thrown away and we must move beyond relying on stereotypes at all.
It's worth pointing out though, that the poor have always been subject to this sort of thing, othered, caricatured, and cast as either saints or demons. In the Victorian period, as Kim Newman pointed out in one of his short stories, A Victorian Ghost Story, the poor were often spoken of in similar tones and terms to ghosts, half soppy sentimentality, and conviction that they were getting what they deserved for their sins, much like Marley's fate in the A Christmas Carol. All we have done, is add a race relations angle to justify lazy thinking. Which isn't to say that its only people protesting at the protests who are engaged in that cognitive vice; there's plenty on the progressive side too.
While it may be true that things are getting better, its obvious that it won't be a simple, or peaceful, process, and there's a great deal of thought to undertaken, not just about the issues in the headlines, or the top news stories, but the things behind those about the invisible world which we've been happy to ignore. As ever, "Cui Bono" (Who Profits), should be our watch word and we must dig deeper in our efforts to deconstruct society, so that eventually we can reconstruct it more fairly. It isn't enough to rage against the Machine anymore. We must come up with plans for what we do once the Machine has been destroyed, because if we want to bring others with us, we must show them the way, and we must make our destruction of the Machine seem positive. Just as Rosling's work required time, and patience, so does this. I shy away from the word Utopia, because its impossible to achieve, but a better world would be one I would die for. What we can do now, is plant the seeds, and water them: we must become gardeners for a better tomorrow. It's literally, all I can see as a way to get us off the Manometer.
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