Tuesday 14 May 2019

The Turning of the Tide


Imagine if tomorrow everyone woke up remembering that our individual responsibility is not just for ourselves but for our whole community, and that our community and the way we live has an impact far beyond the reaches of our towns, cities an even our nation. What if we felt not only responsible for ourselves as a global community but that this responsibility extended to the environment knowing that we are a part of it and an intrinsic part at that.
This is the basic premise on which I wish to base my project that I have called PIPPA (People in Positive Politics Association). When I asked somebody if they might be interested in supporting me, they told me they weren’t really interested in politics, only in supporting their community. This shows me how much our system is broken; that the two have become so separate and our politics in such disarray, people don’t feel it has a place their community any more. 
Actually it cannot be separated, politics is how we organise our society, but party politics has forgotten that. I feel the ‘party’ is well and truly over. It is time to grow up and take stock. I am not saying that everyone in the party political system has lost their way, I am saying that the system is out of date and so the people trying to do good from within it, are being stifled by it. I believe it’s time to break free.
As information becomes ever more available to all we would do well to remember that although knowledge is vital, how we use it is key and that requires wisdom. I am not convinced our political system reflects this. 
There are people who have lived on our planet for eons sustainably and respectfully. They understand that the Earth has its own innate wisdom, greater and more complex than anything we can understand in our minds. We have not only forgotten the ethos these people uphold but have completely devalued them as a race at best and annihilated them at worst. 
I believe that now is the time to look to this wisdom and be prepared to learn from them. But I also believe that is still a wisdom we know. For some it has become clear again, but others may have to dig deep as it has become buried beneath what our society has pushed on us for centuries.
Every moment in our lives is the sum total of all that has been before it but never has this felt more poignant than now. As I sense the tide is finally beginning to turn, I know I am not alone when I say that I have been waiting for this for many years,
As events grew in intensity over the last month, the peaceful rebellion that descended on London, but also all around the world, marked a significant moment of change. Extinction Rebellion might have grown out of nowhere but the energy behind it has been building for years. With the tragic loss of the Ecocide warrior Polly Higgins the metaphorical baton seemed to be almost immediately passed to the young Greta Thunberg. She took this on, along with the political elite of the country, completely in her stride. She has set a new standard showing us how the everyman/woman can be politically engaged.
However, talk is cheap. How can we really start to turn our ship around, look the pollution of our waters, the devastation of our rainforests, the melting of our ice-caps squarely in the face and choose change?
This will not happen by simply passing a few laws, a few companies divesting from the use of fossil fuels and a few less plastic bags being thrown away. This runs deep. We have to reinvent ourselves and our relationship to our beautiful Earth.
Six years ago a young South American fourteen year old boy went to talk to the UN. The message he brought was not that we had to save the Earth but that we need to save ourselves. This sage would have to wait some years for his wisdom to be heard. 
Change can only come when enough energy has been generated and there is a critical mass, enough of a shift in people’s hearts, for it not to be met with resistance. When we truly understand our role here, find the humility needed, we will remember that we are a cog in a wheel of a mechanism that only works when it is in balance. 
I am the eternal optimist, ever confident that we will find our way, but how we get there, how we bridge the gap is the unknown, the challenging but interesting aspect of the journey. Awareness and respect for everyone, starting with oneself feels like a good starting point and my book of the month, Bergman’s Utopia For Realists, has been mind expanding for me. He talks of all the various studies on poverty that have already been carried out and almost implemented. Knowing that we could have been living in a completely different landscape, an alternative reality, had they been brought in, intrigues me.
It is clear that keeping people in wealth and good health costs far less than allowing people to slip into the terrible states that poverty creates. The costs to the state become huge in policing, hospitals and prisons. It is important to remember that the mental anguish is not limited purely to all those concerned here but to society as a whole. This is not only immeasurable in terms of the suffering felt and so beyond financial evaluation. Even more ironic is the fact that the rich suffer more emotionally too.
I can only ask, when are we going to realise that we don’t have to continue like this? When are we going to stop under valuing ourselves as a community and start thinking big, thinking collectively and open-heartedly?



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