Boom Town

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A week after the bombings I still feel rather down.

After nearly ten years here I guess I class myself as 'a Londoner' and feel all the 'a world in a city' stuff. I also don't particularly relish getting on a bus and worrying about being blown up or indeed having to go to a friends funeral just yet.

But people who by a birth lottery haven't been born into a relatively well-off western country suffer and die every day. Tens of thousands of them. Starvation. War. Natural disasters. Shit, there are plenty of people who suffer terribly in this country, who spend their entire lives desperately grabbing at the shitty coat-tails of a culture far from their financial reach yet dangled daily in their faces.

The world is populated by a massive majority that are born, never get anywhere near where they could and die. Some starve and die at 12. Some work in factories and die a mile from where they were born. Others die fighting bullshit wars.

And it happens to us all. No matter our beliefs, colour or nationality.

And equally, a class of people exist, a tiny minority, that start the wars, that uphold the inequality for the sake of profit and self-gratification. That couldn't care less about people's lives.

Like us they're all colours and creeds, and we let them run the show. Let them run a system that leaves the vast majority of the world wallowing about in a psycho-fiscal cess-pool of one sort or another for their benefit. And no, there's not enough wealth in this system for us all. It wouldn't allow it.

The fact that we don't eat each other alive is proof of the inherent human need to cooperate and defy those that want us to live as self-serving individuals. The bottom line is always solidarity in the end.

Well, there we go. Watching Richard and Judy speaking in Trafalgar Square yesterday brought a little blood back to the university-educated, post-ironic cynicism vein at least. So I'm sure we'll be back to the normal bullshit post-haste.

Meanwhile, here's a couple of links to folk doing more than writing a blog:

What George Galloway actually said in Parliament last Thursday is in Hansard here. Note the following that didn't seem to make the news:
'I condemn it utterly as a despicable act, committed against working people on their way to work, without warning, on tubes and buses. Let there be no equivocation: the primary responsibility for this morning's bloodshed lies with the perpetrators of those acts.'

A great article by Seamus Milne in The Guardian is here.

A thoughtful statement from the SWP is here.

And Salma Yaqoob, whom I only respect more and more, is also in The Guardian here.

1 comments:

Smashy said...

POPTASTIC!!!