A Remembrance of Things Past

Once you pass the big six-o you can no longer pretend to be young. In your fifties, you can just about get away with thinking you could go clubbing, even though you never do. It's not just creaking joints that bring about this situation - its change. Things have really changed since you were young, and you have changed. Even though you probably have a mobile phone and use social media things have moved on - Facebook is for boring grown-ups - not the youth of today. For my part, I use Facebook and Twitter, though I loathe the former, but can't be bothered to also use any more social media apps. The gap between you and youth is growing, and it will get wider as time goes on. Their lives, as they develop, will be very different to yours - that's progress - allegedly.

I began to muse about this during the latest episode of my never-ending quest to clear 'stuff' out of the garage - something I suspect many people will be doing for years to come and that will affect children who haven't been born yet - because the only real solution to this problem is not to have a garage. Whilst sorting through stuff I found a box that contained a number of old letters I'd kept dating back to the early eighties. They were all love-letters from ex-girlfriends and I found them very moving. What struck me about them, apart from the passion, was their length and the relative amount of effort involved. Does anybody do that anymore? Does anyone send long passionate emails to their girlfriends or boyfriends? It's possible but I doubt it - we live in the soundbite age of the text and the Tweet.

I think the letter is something from the past, something we are all, young and old, missing and all the poorer for not receiving. I remember the anticipation of receiving a letter, of hearing the clank of the letterbox as the postie made his early morning delivery (you had two posts a day then) and going to pick up the post. Was there a personal letter for me amongst the brown envelopes? Was it from her? Then sitting down to read and digest the letter's contents - it was good, it moved me. And all the better because it was handwritten, and someone had taken the trouble to craft it. It was personal and had a kind of warmth that can never be reproduced in digital communication.

While I'm on the subject of good things we have lost due to 'progress' I need to put in a word for the vinyl record. For people of my generation, your album collection wasn't just a shelf full of records - it spoke about who you were and what you were into. Your record collection was one of your most treasured possessions and something you happily humped around from student flats to shared houses along with your stereo. Now you can have digital devices that store thousands of tracks, create playlists, and listen to virtually any music for free on Spotify, but it's just not the same.

Listening to an album was a ritual, finding the one you wanted, hauling it out, looking at the cover art, lovingly sliding it out of its sleeve, putting it on the deck and then listening to that satisfying clunk as the needle hit the record. Then, sitting down to listen to the music. Listening was a rewarding activity and the music was not just something in the background when you were talking to others or doing the washing up. And the best bit is the fact that the analogue sound quality is superior to digital - warmth, once again.

There is hope for vinyl, sales are increasing, but will we ever see the revival of the letter? We are missing out, but does it matter? Yes, it does.

The US Empire has always been a stain on the world, Now Trump has exposed it.

Another day, another week, another Trump shit show. Recently, there was the Davos debacle. Trump highlighted his obvious decline by blabbering nonsense, talking about Iceland instead of Greenland. This is only to be expected. He also introduced his so-called 'Board of Peace' which includes war criminals Putin, Blair and Netanyahu, all of whom should be in The Hague. This Board of Criminals has been set up to 'legitimize' the destruction of what's left of the Palestinian community in Gaza, and its transformation into the new Dubai for the super-rich, as well as lining Trump's pockets. 

People and Western politicians have been shocked by Trump's ranting about expanding the US Empire with the kidnapping of Maduro from Venezuela, and talk of taking over Greenland, Cuba, Mexico, and anywhere else he fancies controlling. Trump knows that Europe is weak and has relied on the US led NATO for its security for far too long. It's high time that Europe was prepared to defend itself without the Americans. Of course, NATO was a Cold War alliance which should have been disbanded after the collapse of the USSR, but it was maintained to solidify US hegemony.

The US Empire is nothing new, it's just that the rest of the West has turned a blind eye to it since WWII. The Monroe Doctrine, articulated by President James Monroe in 1832 asserted America's control over all the Americas including South America, it's very own backyard. 

Trump's Gaza

The rules-based order was always BS!

In the USA, ICE are roaming Minnesota abducting and murdering citizens with impunity, including Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Thousands of Americans have come together to resist, but the Democrats continue their spineless opposition to paedophile Trump's crimes.

Trumps latest fascist power grab, no doubt designed to rig the mid-terms, is the SAVE Act. It's a voter suppression bill which requires citizens, to provide specific ID to be able to vote, including passports and birth certificates. Many Americans don't have the correct ID. Only 51% of American have passports and birth certificates must have the persons current name. This obviously discriminates against women. This is all shades of the Handmaids Tale, a prescient dystopian book by Margaret Atwood published 50 years ago. The fascist American right want women to be disempowered child bearers (white women, obviously), cooking, washing and bearing numerous kids - just like the good old days. 

The problem with the USA is that, given the pathetic state of the democratic 'opposition' - who are also in the pockets of corporations and oligarchs - it's difficult to see where change is going to come from. And, of course, Trump is a real threat to the wider world. Things in the UK aren't much better with Starmer bending the knee to Trump and mimicking Reform's racism. More of that in my next post.

In 2026, lets all be human

You may not know it, but we are in the fight of our lives. In the USA, UK and Europe, the far right are gaining ground. Trump is already, effectively, a dictator. Empty vessel Starmer is in the pockets of corporations and private equity. All the Western nations, with a few exceptions, are complicit in the Gaza genocide. Now, we wake up in 2026 to see the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife in an illegal attack on Venezuela by Donald Trump. The media, what was left of it, is controlled by oligarchs

So what has happened to humanity? What have we become as humans? Why are some of us voting for and supporting racist, grifting scum like Nigel Farage? How did we get here?

Well, none of this is new. We have lived through many centuries of war, oppression, empire and genocide, with a ruling class dictation the outcomes. I wrote about the toxicity of Western culture in this post  - racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, lavery, empire and settler colonialism have been rife for many centuries.

In the later 20th century, after WWII, with rising equality and prosperity, we thought all this had changed for the better. I was lucky enough to grow up in this time when we thought that things could only get better. They are getting worse.

As I have said many times on this blog, all we can do is work together, resist, and organise to bring about real, positive change. This needs to happen from the grassroots upwards. The people need to take control. No more fake 'democracy' and domination by corporations and oligarchs. We need to foster empathy and humanity, supporting our brothers and sisters. This may seem like a daunting task, but we can make it happen!