Burn Concrete Burn, by Ed Whitfield

Space. The final frontier. You are a voyager upon your very own life, a gift that you received at birth. But, as they say, life is not fair. It’s a dog eat dog world, as another cliché puts it. So what are you going to do about it? As they come snapping at your heals from all directions? This is your life. This is your world. This is your space. All of it. Everywhere you may stumble upon is yours. And it is being eaten up bit by bit by others, bent on greed and spinning on some crazy power trip, forcing you to either wither and die or conform and fight. Is there an alternative?

Space. The final frontier. When everything else is bought and sold, including your mind and your children, what will you have left? Where will you go? What is happening to space? Is it literally being eaten up? What happens to it after those huge walls are erected? Does your space evaporate once enclosed between four adjoining concrete structures? Of course not. It still remains. Your space still exists.

But now it has been claimed by another that is too greedy to share. However it is not the physical blocks that inhibit our using the space, for walls and doors may easily be overcome. The mental conditioning that is now an eclipsing phenomenon of our time is the problem and must be defeated. This is what I mean when I say BURN CONCRETE BURN.

Concrete is a drab, grey substance that you may have seen advertised on television by the Irish Concrete Association, or some other ludicrously dubbed organisation that aims to promote the use of concrete. But can this planet sustain any more of the hardening slime? Have you ever seen a concrete factory? Do you know the percentage of ozone depletion the worlds concrete manufacturing helps produce? Concrete is yet another factor of our modern times that lends a huge hand in its (our) own destruction.

The destruction of nature and therefore us. If you examine nature you may come to be familiar with a process that has been termed ‘death and rebirth’. How nature evolves and grows according to its needs depends on its own destruction, and then re-growth and redevelopment. If we don’t learn from this we run the risk of being wiped out by nature. Yet, our concrete monoliths, built to last, disregarding nature in their permanence, are more than just a symbol of our stupid and ignorant doom trail.

We are now slaves to our own doom trail, addicted to self harm in a sticky downward spiral, inescapable in its slope, as we consume the ground right out from under our feet. To ensure that we remain addicted and complacent we have built prisons for ourselves. Huge cities made of concrete that we trail our lifeless bodies through upon the fairways leading to the doorways of those temples to consumerism. Concrete buildings creating systematic avenues where we, as if mechanised and lacking in free will, traipse through mindlessly scanning and searching for that something that just might scratch that internal and infinite f***ing itch, that yearning deep inside that we spend our lives foolishly thinking we can satisfy by buying things and consuming.

Mental slavery. And in the process not only do we become slaves to that physical nature but also to the mental properties that occur through a lifetime of such conditioning and experience. Concrete culture helps create mental shackles. If we wish to participate, as most of us do due to lack of imagination and will, we must flow with the ebbs of society. And those flows and ebbs, courses and conducts are all created and maintained by our environment, conditioning how we use our space. Through deeply psychological and abstract methods we are led to believe that we must act a certain way in a particular environment. When on a bus we must act accordingly, we do not drink or play music or dance and sing. When walking through the streets we must look directly ahead or to the side at the shop windows unless we meet one who is not a stranger where we may greet and smile, but almost only in this form of instance. When crossing the road we must resign ourselves to the whims of the motorist. When walking through a public park we must ‘respect the park and others’, which of course is fair enough, but taken to the extent that it has been taken to, it tends to create the feeling that when they say ‘public’ they don’t mean you! But when in the middle of a field, alone and isolated beneath a star filled night’s sky, how must one act? What do you do when u find yourself lost along an empty stretch of coast? Can you bring yourself to scream? To get naked? To jump on the spot or run in a circle? And when you find yourself sandwiched between two slabs of concrete, could you bring yourself to do any of those things then? If not, why not?

With all this in mind: A revolutionary act must consist less of a mass insurgence or class warfare, which leftist ideologies may try and create, but of personal acts of liberation that may de-legitimise that authority which is afforded through the aforementioned conditioning. We must begin to break away at the ‘socialization’ that builds up around the person we once were, creating the slave we are now, by testing ourselves and our limits, our loves and our desires. What we can and what we cant, and when we find we cant then perhaps we should try harder. We must strive to throw these shackles of our minds and rid ourselves of the notions and inhibitions that are laid upon us through our existence within this society. For it is a sick society, one that is decaying and rotting. Our minds are rotting. Our communities are rotting. Our world is rotting. All thanks to concrete, both physically and mentally. All we can do is try. Before its all too late.

BURN CONCRETE BURN

Burn it to the ground so that someday we may see through the fog of mental slavery and realise the freedom afforded to us by our lives and our space.

The agenda we have set, the one we support every time we consume, spend, drive, work, watch, is the most anti-social force society has and could ever face. Society is what is created through the bonds, networks and conditions that occur when people socialize, when people interact with one another through communities.

But how can this process take place if our communities are dead? If that agenda that we help set in concrete every day of our lives exists and in turn helps us to become a secularly individual people, isolated from one another within our small, private, concrete prisons after having day leave to do another’s work? We arrive ‘home’ too tired to socialize, too tired to be a community. Who wants the hassle?

Community projects can no longer even afford community insurance. More and more people are coming to live within geographical communities, within a specific area that is, dedicated to feed larger concrete prisons. Suburbs and satellite towns that die during the day, come to life during rush hours then vegetate during the evening and sleep during the night. The community is dead, leaving no forum or place for people to come together and become involved in the processes that are essential for society to develop. Instead we elect representatives and send them off to discuss and create these essential bonds and networks. But what worth can these ever be of, set so far apart from our own lives?

-- Ed Whitfield, December 2005

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