Monday, August 08, 2011

I think that the media characterisation of the instigators of riots in London last night as faceless, ominous 'gangs of youths' is a manifestation of the underlying fear of those currently in power (and I use that term loosely to describe all those who are at the helm of, and benefit from, the current socio-economic set up as much as the ConDem govt. itself) that the next generation have realised how much we are being royally fucked over and aren't going to take it lying down. They are taking our NHS, an hours wage buys fuck all, and those of us who are 'lucky' enough to even get jobs will be working until we drop to try and fill the bottomless pit of the previous generation's pension deficit. We are constantly hit with a barrage of images telling us that we are not real people unless we buy our selves from the shop shelves, shiny gadgets and made-up faces and fast cars and homes plucked from the pages of catalogues. We are grasped at by tiny invisible hands that try to snatch away whatever we blindly, naively accumulate in the hope of becoming one of those golden few 'winners' - the holy grail of aspiration, the myth that keeps us docile, submissive, in the hope that one day we too might receive a crumb from that richest of cakes. In a society geared towards winning, there will always be losers. Is it any wonder that a myth of human worth based around our ability to accumulate mass produced objects of desire is inevitably accompanied, when that ability is frustrated, by anger, resentment, and efforts to take by force what capitalism has told us we are worthless without? You told us we need these THINGS to be worthy of being counted as worthwhile human beings, and yet after hours of work and credit checks they still remained so close and so visible but just out of reach, behind the polished glass of shop windows. Of course windows will be broken when alls people can see in them is the reflection of a face that cannot attain what is concealed by the glass. Fuck being a real person. Fuck trying to 'win'. What did you expect?

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