100 Naked Words — Day 15
We are BETTER than This
Reflections, Ripples and Ramblings of a Restless Mind
I’ve avoided talking about it as long as possible. I’ve restrained myself as others leaped, joyfully, to poke the tiger. I’ve hoped that cometh the hour, cometh the man.
Hope is not a strategy, and at best all I have been doing is hiding from the truth. Or rather the alternative facts.
I wrote some time ago about the Post, Post, Post world we were about to enter into (Truth, Brexit, Trump), I posted a short but pithy comment on one of Brexit’s most despicable and anti-intellectual campaign quotes — it racked up over 2k views and almost as many reads.
As with much of what I write here in Medium I try and add a little bit of the dry wit us Britishers are so famous for, a smidgen of humour to ease the pain. I would have liked to to do the same here.
I’m struggling.
As a writer, I use metaphor and simile to engage my readers, I paint pictures that draw the eye where I wish it to be drawn. I embellish and add colour, I stretch (a little) to hold attention. But everything I write (even fiction) is grounded in a truth, in fact. And where I take liberties with reality, I hope my readers give me licence and have the smarts to understand the intent. But I NEVER say black when it is, in fact white. I never intentionally, however inventively, MISLEAD.
I don’t purposely abuse the trust you’ve put in me.
Because seriously, dear reader, as my wife might say: Che cazzo?! I could understand if we had been fed some tenuous rationale to explain the lack of attendance — it rained, it was a workday, we sent out the wrong save the date card, the dog ate my supporters — I mean we know that all politics is spin, we expect to be fed a line and they expect that many will spit it out for the foul tasting excrement it is.
But to try and convince the world that the sky is red when in fact it is blue and to be offended that you don’t accept this alternative reality and to be militant in your attempts to reprogram others’ perception of that reality, makes me feel like I have woken in some Orwellian netherworld.
And I don’t even live in America.
What more is there to say; today we heard more about the wall brawl, furtherance of the plans to ban, and the exec order on the use of foreign aid for abortions.
I really do try not to be political, but the preceding 12 months and the 12 that are to come, especially in Europe, are going to change the landscape for years, decades to come. And I am fearful of the ease with which almost fascist ideologies are becoming passed off as populism as nationalism and worse — as the will of the people.
And maybe the bubble I live in out here in London, or in here on Medium needs to be expanded, or burst.
Maybe I need to get out there and understand how my thinking could be so out of sync, how my idealism is considered so irrelevant.
All I know is that the world is heading down a number of dangerous paths, and if there were ever a time for individuals to stand up and make themselves heard, that time is now.
I’m glad I found my voice.
