Britain has been broken, splintered from every corner and they can’t quite put all the pieces back together again. This shot of a ‘gaffer tape union jack’ could not be a more appropriate visual metaphor, and all the other pictures this week symbolically represented the distorted,and subsequently divisive, perception of our national identity. Monday’s shot was an image that reflected the “great” days of the British Empire. Tuesday was a street art portrait of the Queen in her headscarf, looking like an ordinary elderly woman, the flag behind her, sprayed onto a shutter of a shop closed for business. Wednesday was a woman kneeling in front of the English flag, shadows closing in around her, seemingly defeated whilst a sign in the window states: ‘Take the risk, or lose the chance’. And then yesterday, a shot of a newspaper (yesterday) which cruelly echoed the famous headline that appeared after the first massive wave of European immigrants into this country: “Will the last person in Poland please switch off the lights?”
A lot of people freaked out when so many Eastern Europeans came over here but there is only one statistic that was ever relevant in relation in immigration: they put more in than they take out. So what was the problem exactly? A threat to our sovereignty? What even is that? Why are we defined by the country we were born in? We could have been born anywhere. Why do we need to take up everything it stands for, lock, stock and barrel? Everyone’s been banging on about sovereignty but all I know is you can’t pay your rent with it and you can’t eat it.
The attempt to preserve our national identity in the face of a globalised existence has brought this country to its knees but it doesn’t really exist. It is a concept. It is not real. In the highly enlightening book ‘Sapiens’ by Yuval Noah he explains how societies are held together with ‘imagined belief systems’ which are ideas that everyone agrees to follow so that we can all get along and function. Religion, capitalism, national and cultural identity are all ‘imagined belief systems that people adhere to so that their society doesn’ fall apart at the seams. When people stop believing in the same thing, it all starts to fragment and divisions emerge and hostility between different belief systems takes hold. This is where we are at. In order for harmony to be reinstated we would need to create a new belief system. The question is, what could we all unite over? What do we now all believe? In a post-truth world of fake news where opinion carries more weight that fact, it will be hard to find anything we all agree on. Even the flat earth theory is back for fuck’s sake. Now that little nugget of truth arrived many moons ago so the fact it is now in question again shows how demented things have got. Devolution is officially in effect.
The only thing we could all agree on, if everyone was to accept the data and what they know deep down to be happening is that it is all a distraction from the climate emergency that is taking over this planet. This is thr common enemy that will affect everyone and could be the one thing that would finally unite us as a single tribe where we would see beyond identity, race, gender, religion, politics and just see a single species in desperate need of unification to defeat this threat to our survival…if only people could agree it existed. Acceptance will lead to a solution. And we do need a solution. Nothing else matters…not even Brexshit.
I went to my first ever Extinction Rebellion this week. It was very encouraging to meet people who are not just going to sit back and wait for nothing to happen. They are galvanising into a global organisation that will do anything it can to raise the issue so that they declare it the level of emergency that it truly is. They are organising a massive demonstration/shut down of London on April 15th but are planning things all over the world. There are groups springing up everywhere. If there isn’t one local to you, start one. Time to get on board cos they’re ain’t no other train leaving the station. We have to fight. We cannot go from denial to defeat and skip the solution bit. We inherited a working planet and an environment contusive to our species. We must do everything we can to pass that on to future generations. Join the resistance: https://rebellion.earth
The time for ignoring this shit is over…
