Climate Camp. No Reflection. Just Pictures. Thanks Max

The other fight

It was always going to be a stressful week. Eleven different events over 5 days, meeting speakers, renting staging, publicising, sitting through long talks that you leave knowing no more than when you went in. The stress however, is not entirely because of One World Week. It is all to easy to forget sometimes, when you're in the office until late at night, that a life exists outside of fighting for a better world.
Then it hits you, and you have to take stock, other things do matter. You're in love, your mind is stuck on repeat and it isn't dwelling on global warming or freeing tibet.
I'm forcing myself to write tonight- i'm tired, it's late and tomorrow beckons. I don't want it to come too soon.

Foregone conclusion

They look so different. One a good-looking, smiling, tall black man. The other short, old, white and seemingly without the ability to smile without scaring children. The differences between them are not just superficial, they come from different parts the USA, they have grown up differently, they have joined political parties who see themselves as on opposite sides of the spectrum. Yett, despite the tussles, the millions of hard earned dollars they have spent insulting each other, the apparent disparities, they are not such a world apart.

Subscribing to capitalism is to be expected in a country that has spent the best part of the last century locking up, torturing and waging wars upon those who oppose it. Barack Obama's tax rise for the rich is seen as radical, but as he keeps insisting 95% of people will not see a rise. The logical inadequacies are there for all to see. In a country where there is widespread poverty, inadequate healthcare for 30m, a crumbling education system and racial inequality like almost no other place on earth, noone is talking about redistributing the wealth of the 'poor over taxed middle class' and sending it the lowest earners in society. Politics needn't bother itself with the working class: They don't vote, they don't pay much tax and there aren't enough of them anymore. The United States could look no further than its European allies to realise the benefits of progressive taxation.
Why in a country that has such high expecations of the services they use is there not a mass movement for a truly fair health system that is free at the point of use?

Capitalism is not the only subscription that the three hundred million Americans are exposed to. In a world with increasingly little resource for more and more people it seems only too obvious that we must try and use less, buy less and conserve what we have. Not in American. Less is bad. More is good. Why buy less when you can buy something else? Why drive less when you can buy a car which is slightly less harmful to the environment? In fact why not buy two? Why not invest in coal and oil technology and blindly sign up to nuclear power instead of trying to curb your embarrassing appaetite for energy? Why not, when you have 3% of the worlds population, use 25% of it's oil? Why don't they wake up? I don't think anyone's realise that they are sleeping yet.

I want to look forward to a bushless world. A world without aggressive neo-liberalism, without post-colonial war projects, without a neo-conservative christian crusade but that is what we are signing up to when we hold our new, black, young hero aloft. We are signing up to god-driven, nationalistic, war supporting, free market capitalism with just a few tweaks. I don't resent you America but we're all fucked.

I have been institutionalised

Time has dissapeared without my knowledge or consent and I shall not attempt a retrospective roundup of what has been or what I have become because neither have much interest or value to them. To summarise though my life- personal, political, private and public has taken a turn. My age is no longer tied down to the number of years that I have existed for, I have responsibilities that, only 9 months ago, were not even close to my imagination.

Without being too downbeat about all of this blog malarky, or simply being innacurate, I don't expect anyone to ever read this except maybe me, just like I have done in the last few minutes- it amused and entertained me to look back on my thoughts about things metamorphise over the last few years and I want that to continue. I want to feel my cheeks burn red as I sit in a room by myself as I face my own naivety and for that reason I shall try and bring some more of me into to this, because afterall I am a thrilling person. Proof of that can be found in my mental lifestyle: I work until well past dark, most days. I wake up early for meetings. I eat the same packaged sandwhich about 4 days a week. There is a distinct possibility that I have fallen in love with my bike.

But why do I fight?

I want to say this ' I fight because I feel, no I know, that I will make a difference to those who are less fortunate than me. I will stand up for those who are weak, make rich those who are poor and defend our planet for future generations'.

But why do I fight?

I fight because without the fight I am one of many. I fight because I am well-off, I am middle-class and I need to feel needed. I genuinely do fight because injustice, like nothing else, makes me fucking angry, and that is enough.

And what am I fighting?

Bureacracy mostly and laziness and apathy and my own habits that give no example at all to those who I spend my life preaching to. I fight my friends who believe that sexism is natural or who think that the free market will fix our problems. I fight myself when, at the end of the day I want to curl up and cry rather than face the next day answering emails or justifying myself in an increasingly ill informed and close minded world. I fight those who think that there is a 'time and place for protests' and that time and place is far away from anyone who can hear. I fight those who think they can't make a difference or who have tried and failed. I fight my mind when it wants to miss the next meeting and ring my girlfriend and talk idly about this and that. I fight the urge to get drunk and dance when I have to go to a lecture.

I have been institutionalised.