Thoughts #2 — Becoming homeless, the next war, and Human evolution
17/03/2017
This a series cataloguing my favourite half-baked thoughts throughout the day/week/month/whatever. Hopefully they raise some interesting questions or merely provide some cool insight.
1. St Patricks Day (Waking up and seeing the calendar)
Sigh. I don’t really know how to get into this one. On this day last year I was made homeless. I won’t go into the details around the cause but I’ll never forget the irony of it occurring on St Patrick’s Day — a day synonymous with good luck and fortune.
(I tweeted about the Universe/God having the sickest sense of humour on the day — but I can’t find it)
I remember waiting at the council office this day last year for hours with my mum. The judgemental stares, the snide remarks, the sunny weather with a cool breeze, McDonalds breakfast — pancakes and sausages. What surprised me most about the day wasn’t the loss, or the confusion. It was how little emotion I felt around it. Guess I was still processing everything but in all honesty, I didn’t feel upset or angry at the time in the slightest. That would come later. On the day I largely felt pretty… normal tbh, perhaps a bit stoic but that’s me on a regular day. It was odd to me how emotionally bankrupt I felt about the whole ordeal. Like I should feel something but I didn’t.
The sadness set in once I begun couch surfing for weeks on end. For a person that generally keeps themselves to themselves, the constant social contact really messed with my mental and it was a battle to stay relatively positive.
The anger came when we began staying at a temporary accommodation in Kilburn — 3 of us to 1 room.
Broken windows, broken washing machine, broken oven, scalding then freezing shower, open sewage system outside the front door, screaming neighbours next door, crying babies below, damaged chairs, 24/7 traffic outside, uneven flooring — the wardrobe fell and narrowly missed my mum at one point, a bathroom so narrow you’d have to sit diagonally to close the door. No Wi-Fi — this hurt me the most I won’t lie. Broken doors & busted light bulbs. All 1st world problems though.
Travelling to and from my volunteer job in Shoreditch, then between my part time job and internship. I remember the day after we lost our home I had to go to my volunteer job. In fact I didn’t have to go, but I needed to take my mind off of it all. I couldn’t. It was the hardest day and I stared at the computer aimlessly for a while before leaving early.
Whilst I was volunteering I was stopped by a homeless brother who asked for change. Before he got to spit his routine, I had to let him know right off the bat I was homeless and broke too — I didn’t have a job at the time outside volunteering. We hugged right there outside Sainsbury’s on Bethnal Green Road at 8:30am before talking about his situation.
Normality somewhat returned when an Uncle I’d never once heard of offered me a place to stay. I crashed here for 3 months and it was amazing just to have my own room. My own space. Space I had forgotten the feel of after 4 months of couch surfing and temp living. Space I swore to never take for granted again.
2016 was one of the hardest years of my life. It even seemed to perfectly mirror how shit 2016 was for the rest of the world. A year later I moved into my own place and leveraged my experiences of the year to land my career job — at Shelter the housing and homelessness charity. Squeezing lemonade from Lemons. I’m good at my job (campaigns and supporter mobilisation) but I sometimes wonder if I got the position because of my experience being homeless for all those months. The Universe/God really does have a twisted sense of humour.
2. Trump preparing for war (Browsing Twitter this Morning)
False Flag: An attack staged by one entity (e.g. domestic government) in order to deceive people into thinking it was caused by another entity (e.g. foreign government)
You see how we all ‘sort of’ joke about Bush doing 9/11? How his admin genuinely lied about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction — which then paved the way for a full scale invasion of Iraq. False Flags. It’s crazy to think about but that’s what happens when you have a bumbling idiot for a president; surrounded my megalomaniacs and racis- oh. Getting déjà vu here… ~
I mean Bush was bad, real bad, and the U.S STILL somehow managed to get someone worse than him into power.
President Trump (fuck I can’t get used to that) recently announced massive cuts to areas such as:
· Environmental Protection Agency
· Department of Health and Human Services
· Department of Housing and Urban Development — many inner city after school/summer programmes are getting the chop here.
· Foreign aid — over 20 million people in East Africa and North-East Nigeria are experiencing a huge famine, right now
The reason for these cuts? To pave the way for a huge rise in military spending. The US already has the largest, most advanced and most funded military in the word. For what reason would you have to cut back on environmental protection and after school programmes to fund a military not, at war? Why cut back other vital programmes to fund your already bloated armies unless you’re preparing for something big. As I write this, Trump has been in power for 56 days. He still has just under 4 years left.
Trump knows we will go to war with someone. His ego won’t let him come to a compromise with anyone, he has to win. America has to win. Whether it’s the Chinese, North Koreans, ISIS, Iran or even U.S civilians rising up to a tyrant; America is on a collision cause somewhere. Trump has his foot glued to the accelerator.
If ‘Bush did 9/11’ and fabricated bullshit around WMDs to invade Iraq. I’m honestly scared to think about what President Trump could do when he doesn’t get his way. Or worse, when he get’s bored.
3. Cybernetic enhancements (Browsing Twitter)
With genetic engineering and technology progressing at incredible rates. I wonder what the world would look like if some of us had been cybernetically enhanced with things like mechanical eyes that could zoom, arms with super strength that could shoot lasers or even fingers that could alter their shape for delicate and precise surgery. We’re seemingly only limited by our imagination here, but to be honest there’s another major limitation to consider — ethics. Would we even be human anymore once we start removing body parts and replacing them with technology? I mean… it’s obvious people with prosthetic limbs are still human. But if I remove my brain and put it in a computer, am I still a person? What about if all my internal organs were replaced with machines? Where do we draw the line between human and machine?
Would Cybernetic enhancements be something you’d have to pay for? Essentially meaning only the rich would have access to it? If so, we would create a caste society of enhanced-humans and demi humans. Imagine kids of wealthy families had been enhanced to the point where they couldn’t ever get sick. As an employer with a choice between this superhuman that would take no sick days and you — Sicky McSickson (I’m off sick as I write this), the choice doesn’t really seem difficult at all, particularly if you’re equal in every aspects. Factor in other things wealth can currently buy (good education, nutrition, connections, experiences) and this gap widens further.
Wait, let me backtrack a little bit. What originally set off this trail of thinking was that I saw someone had removed some of their ribs in order to have a slimmer waist. I thought this was crazy. Removing actual bones — the purpose of which is to hold our organs in place and protect them from external damage. To each their own, but then I began thinking; as a society, we’re comfortable with (cosmetic) plastic surgery. The debate around it’s ethics is basically over. I remember it being a fairly big deal growing up as a kid but now, we’ve accepted that people (rightfully so) should be able to do with their body whatever they want. They typically have to pay expensive costs but this has been largely accepted. It hasn’t created a cast society of enhanced and unenhanced in the same way cybernetics would. When this debate inevitably flairs up again, I wonder what the ramifications would be. If it gets accepted into society — caste system. If it doesn’t — black market criminality.
I’ve turned this into a black and white argument so I hope, we can somehow find the grey.
To read about my previous thoughts on Growing Human, builder-boy-bands and if the World moved to Africa-> Ta da.
