I SEE DEAD PEOPLE

Article by Beth Porter

Probing The Equinox

Spring ahead, chant the schoolkids… Fall back! An amusing refrain, though without actual consequence. Every year it’s the same old/same old. So boring, so witless in print and social media… as though Time itself would cease to exist whichever argument held sway. Ooh, look how mighty are we… who can hold Time in our mitts, shape it this way and that. A dilemma indeed!

Yes, our ancestors plotted the phenomenon, but it was only when successive governments were persuaded by Big Biz to codify the time changes as policy, did it pop up as law. First in the US, then the UK.

When Benjamin Franklin served as Ambassador to France, he devised a daylight savings scheme allegedly to save on candles. But it wasn’t until the British builder William Willett published The Waste of Daylight in 1907, that prompted a change to UK law in 1917. Big Biz quickly harnessed the legislation to their advantage, toughening control over their work-force. With the certainty of impending war, Parliament was eager to comply. So round and round we go.

Many have written about all that; I want to paint the bigger picture. From Nature V Nurture to the widest geo-political scrutiny. We’re all dying, if we live long enough! Ha-Ha!

Considering my own aging body, and impossible to see until recently, are the small physical changes that have popped up because I’ve lasted this long. Much is genetic, locked into my DNA till released by some signal to appear… like those trees that only fruit every ten years, or insects living underground as one stage of their development till they can burst forth, mate, grow wings and fly away.

My biome now includes a clump of hair that suddenly refuses to grow. And, an outbreak of skin tags… all tested and thankfully benign. Most mysterious is a tendency to sweat just on one side. I’m sure I perspire all over, but I can’t explain this recent glandular activity. None of these is life-threatening, but it’s only because I’m able to observe the changes that eluded my younger days, that prompts such questions.

Baffled as I am [especially given my lack of any factual scientific or medical expertise], the world around me is just as enigmatic, mainly driven by levels of hypocrisy. It’s head-to-toe with strange bedfellows. And who might be sleeping on the floor?

Who’s Right & What’s Left?

The loudest media bleats represent the class divide. Even without a bottom-line calculation, not one single head of state nor government official is other than a millionaire or, more recently, a billionaire. Most, too, are men, though I’m not making a gender point… certainly not here in the UK boasting a female Scottish First Minister and an enthroned monarch about to celebrate her Lovely Jubbly year.

Only those of her subjects already enthral to the jewel-encrusted embodiment of this royal imposter will fool themselves into believing the whole nation shares their saccharine sense of togetherness, bolstered by chants in churches from the rudest parsonage to Westminster Abbey. There’s certainly not much scrutiny of a pedagogy failing in every respect; not even one child of supra-constitutional succession has escaped marital sadness and break-down. The so-called Firm’s driving engine is to preserve the concept of monarchy at all costs. Costs aplenty! And we, who can least afford it, must pick up the tab.

Worth it, you claim, for her lifetime of service. What a crock! The entirety of the NHS, including all its front-liners and support staff in every nook and cranny provide more public service every single day regardless of race, creed, or colour, than any member of any royal household produces in a lifetime. I wonder, seriously, what that privileged elite might do to dissuade or eliminate any genuine person of left-wing conviction seeking to challenge the bastions of false democracy. Are there dead folk under palatial floorboards?

Meanwhile, our very doorstep is strafed by weapons both cited and denied by various military factions. The media claims to understand Russia’s motives and tactics underpinned by economic sanctions, barely mentioning which of our allies depends on the procurement of oil and gas, and only a whisper of the substantial revenue derived from Russian opal mining. President Biden warns China [as though it were a toddler and not a sophisticated culture of global influence]… that it must not offer military or financial help to that ’bad guy’ Putin against that nice Mr. Zelensky.

British right-wingers allied with global industries and pursuing their own political agendas, carefully word their gutless support for right-wing Ukraine, Bulgaria, Poland, and those US dominated NATO forces pretending to defend instead of allowing the more democratic procedures of the UN to take a more considered course. Some bleaters, assured they’ll buy bunkers of safety, now posit ‘limited nuclear war’… no words can express such ignorance and idiocy. How many dead people?!

Leaving aside Boris Johnson’s birthday cake and his outrageous comparisons between Brexit and the Nazis, barely anyone mentions the insane brutality of the Tsars, who devastated all Russia for several thousand years. Ukrainian Jews and Romanian gypsies were especially persecuted, supported by British monarchs in succession. None more so than Queen Victoria, some of whose children married into the oligarchies of Russia and the Baltic and Teutonic states.

I’m no more enlightened than you about Putin’s mental health, let alone his Grand Plan ambitions. But we can all join the dots that complicate the contributing factors of hypocrisy that redefines diplomacy. Yep, more super-rich right-wing middle-aged blokes, heads topped with yarmulkas, others with the Arab scarf-like keffiyeh, secured by an agal. Defending democracy? I don’t think so! Who else has diplomatic form? Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, another right-wing middle-aged millionaire? Uhm… nope! Not to mention that 10 million people will be trapped in fuel poverty within a few years, as predicted by broadcaster Martin Lewis CBE. Another millionaire!

When it’s now so impossible to untangle the yarns of truth and falsehood, those of us trying to reach outposts of understanding can be forgiven for keeping our own counsel. No, not hiding, but not wanting to add to the hysteria. The BBC, from its various broadcast platforms, has wisely taken to caveat reports of this or that with that protective adjective ‘unconfirmed.’ Even such a robust warrior as Amnesty International calls the invasion of Ukraine a human catastrophe that could constitute war crimes, its operative word being ‘could.’

Remember The Equinox

As daylight and darkness inch to trade places every six months, we yearn to ignore a scary chimera half-trivia, half-sombre. A dilemma indeed! Over it all, the Greta Generation tries to confront and conquer the gloom implied by redefining some better tomorrow. Let’s hope they can at least limit the dead.

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