Anything But This! by Ed Whitfield
How can you be happy if you consume poisoned food and drink contaminated water on a daily basis? How can you be ok with the fact that in our part of the world we are used as guinea pigs for processed foods, that there are so many chemicals put in all our food, to preserve, to colour and to addict? None of it is really all that safe, or not much is known of the effects yet, but our governments allow them all the same, disregarding our health for free trade and more profits. We have no real control over the food we eat due to the lifestyle we lead and the authority we concede to above us.
How can you be ok with the way everything is driven in the same direction, that everything is homogenised and uniformed? One way. Like every time you visit somewhere new, its just the same as the last place, the people all possess the same, insular attitude and, all in all, everything, everywhere is all just the same. No room for difference or discovery.
How can you be happy if everywhere you go the land around you is all sectioned off by fences and walls? They way your mind is an open plain and so too was the land, but now that it is wholly segregated and this sears and constricts the once flowing nature of your mind also. Everything from the space you move within to the way you picture your life, everything is now separate and divided. Buildings, roads, fields, borders, nations, love life, social life, career, family. Separate. Divided. Isolated. Alienated. Alone. Unfriendly.
How can you be ok with living in a society that is constantly doing its best to invade the mind and space of the sexual being? Where people are taught that what they desire, their very nature is wrong and ‘dirty’. When what is most private and intimate between two people can lead to such debilitating complexes and legal consequences and persecution.
How can you be happy if all you can do when you go outside is go into a shop? When every street, and the very function of ‘outside’ in general is almost a no-go area to those without money and those without the means of acquiring money.
How can you be ok with the ‘best system we have’, capitalism, as our oxygen supply is mowed down at a ferocious rate to create land that, just before it turns into desert, feeds cattle that will soon be minced for our fast food outlets that are slowly killing our obese nations as the reserve labour force is too poor to buy healthy 'organic' food while they wait patiently for the economic downturn that will create the strikes and the employment turn over, but unfortunately this occurrence has shifted to the greener labour pastures of the 'developing' world, leaving rising tigers half mast and tarnished while promising the fools-gold to the next chump nation while they sell their souls and civil liberties for a big Mac and coke a decade or so after the guns have gone home. Beautiful system.
How can you ever be happy when safe in the knowledge that the very lifestyle that consumes all those around you in both space and time, will also eventually take those that are close to you? Without a universal change in lifestyle, those precious sub cultures will continue becoming void with age as your friends drop off to become ‘responsible’.
The mundane and the everyday is a soul destroying force. When one is faced with the ‘reality’ that they must gain their living, sacrifice their youth for a pension, sacrifice their life for a heaven, they accept their fate, lower their head, lower also their expectations of the life they once were encouraged to dream of, as they head into the fray of the mundane and the everyday. And everyday the mundane wears them down a little further. More and more of their spirit is shaved away as the routine of earning a living becomes more real and more desperate.
Well, what we want is MORE! We want more for and from our life and we expect to get it, even if we die trying. Break away from the everyday!
Nothing is forever. Life is not stable. Things don’t stay the same. Control is futile as you can never be certain of any outcome ever. Life is out of control yet we attempt constantly to gain control. Over our life, our environment, our selves, our relationships, and so on.
We may as well float upon it, as a feather in the wind, a leaf on a river. A tear down a cheek. We should not strive for security in the long term but wake up and seek what changes can surprise us on a daily basis. We must not try to imagine things to be of the same nature the very next day. Things change, let go and accept that which becomes.
Stop living in the past and looking to the future. All that matters, all that exists, is now.
Armed only with our words, our thoughts and our willingness to refuse and resist, we enter each day, not in search of refuge, but in an earnest attempt to turn things around for those that may be stuck, such as ourselves and those other unfortunates whose imaginations may have been arrested by the pressure to conform.
Right now there is nothing more we can do than prepare ourselves for that moment to come, after the spontaneous spark and the domino effect, toppling the status quo and throwing the clasp of the economy from our backs, freeing our actions as our minds have freed themselves now.
We all have different degrees, levels as to where our threshold lies regarding that moment when we become polarised towards revolutionary action. Some day enough peoples threshold shall be breached and it might actually be possible to tip the balance towards the overthrowing of the powers that be and instating a common land where one and all possess an equal amount of that power, and no one shall be placed above another.
There is not much I can do other than encourage others to perhaps lower that threshold, for them to see what it is that is going on around them and to realise that not only must something be done, but that it can be done, to believe no longer in the institutions of exploitation and control, but in themselves and their own nature, and to help create an autonomous community that functions independent of, and ignores, the state.
Accept your shortcomings. Cease the futile and vain attempt to achieve abstractions that are out of reach and fed to you by those who seek to profit from your lost and confused vanity and the fact that you will never feel happy, feel comfortable. Feel human.
-- Ed Whitfield, December 2005
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