I’m watching the seagulls as they pour their vengeance down upon a crow, fluttering and stalling in the afternoon sky but resisting again and again until the onslaught becomes too much and it is forced to retreat to the crown of a tree far away. The seagulls catch the thermals and rise away to wherever it was they were defending. All this is viewed through a double-glazed window looking out onto a concrete and blacktop street lined, end-to-end, with brick, glass and concrete houses.
All this is out “there”, maybe fifty metres from where I stand, but a whole world away from the one I still live in: civilization came and took me from birth, entrapped me in a place I would call home and assume was the only place that mattered. I grew up; I dreamed of exam results, a degree, a job, a house, promotion, computers, fitted kitchen, conservatory, holidays, retirement…I don’t remember dreaming of death much. It was there, though, after the pension, or maybe before: before I had the time to enjoy the fruits of 40 years of toil, working for the machine that I called “employment”, buying the goods of the machine that I called “retail”, looking through the windows of the machine that I called “home”.
I want to be up there with the birds. Fuck the machine; fuck the system; fuck this steel, concrete and glass veneer that shuts us in and keeps us close so we can bleed ourselves dry in pursuit of a dream we have been forcefed from birth – a dream that sucks the humanity out of us and leaves civilians: loyal, hard-working, dreaming civilians that watch the skies for a second then turn away, unmoved.
I’ve spent my whole life feeling like that, since I realised as a teenager that it is all lies designed to make us do someone else’s bidding. to waste our lives, ignoring our own feelings and desires, serving corporate interests, waiting for friday night and ultimately retirement and death.
I raised kids with not enough money, no secure home, and always just managing, but ensuring that I was at home as much as I could be, and teaching them ourselves to try to help them avoid the brainwashing.
Is it any wonder that this culture is trashing our life support system?
We are forced to ‘work’ if we want a roof over our heads, or food in our bellies. Productivity is sold to us as positive, while idleness is wrong.
These fundamental values of good and bad will need to be changed, if humans want to live on a viable planet. We need the freedom to relax, and pursue our daydreams, to listen to the trees and to our own internal clocks. We need to free our lives from the bossman, and the landlords, so that we might truly live, here and now, and hopefully realise that most of the ‘benefits’ of civilisation were just cons to distract us from the damage that civilisation does to us.
We a lot to learn and to do – not least of all to relearn how to do nothing, so that we might start feeling the awe that our amazing planet and its wildlife inspires.