A quote and a rant.

I’m in the mood for a quote today.

“Evil isn’t the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it’s a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference.”

We see stupidity, and the results of it, everywhere we look, every day; in the newspapers, the shops. the courtrooms, the streets and on TV. Even when roaming the countryside it is evident. Life-giving, deciduous woodlands have been obliterated, hedges which supported hosts of advantageous living creatures have been razed to the ground, to increase the size of mono culture systems. We spray herbicides, further damaging the ecological balance and introducing toxins into our food chain.

We take a pill to fix our ill rather than keeping the oils wheeled form the start, and we don’t even realise that all we are doing is playing into the hands of the drugs companies and the processed food producers, or how connected they all are to each other. We imbibe alcohol to ensure a better evening in the company of friends and even family, because we think that none of us are fun enough without it. We take street drugs for the pleasure of the moment and let them possess us, while they eat our bodies and our minds.

We feel we are missing something, and every time we see an advertising billboard that promises a better life for a small cost we fall into the trap and pay the money, only to be disappointed when the new car or the kitchen appliance or new shoes don’t fill the hole after all. But we continue to engage in retail therapy as if it is virtue, quickly discarding each ill-advised purchase, and storing the rest. We buy lottery tickets purely to have a big win, telling ourselves that if we do we’ll give most of it to charity. Week after week, lucky winners are crushed beneath the unexpected weight of the dollar, while needy charities gain from each newly addicted gambling victim.

We churn filth into the air from huge industrial chimneys. We build nuclear power stations that slowly poison the surrounding area. We convert our planet to plastic: Clingfilm to use once and then discard, plastic toys from vending machines and MacDon’t-go-there’s to be glanced at before lying forgotten behind the sofa. Packaging, packaging, packaging.

We fly flags and say this-country-is-ours-you-can’t-have-it-‘cos-we-haven’t-got-enough-to-share, instead of caring for the whole world and making it a better place to live in. We hate and despise instead of looking within ourselves and nurturing hidden compassion. We want what our neighbour has and when we have it we want more. We want it all, and are prepared to pay for it with our souls, crushing rather than feeding. We think that the starving child in Africa doesn’t matter, because his agony is so distant and our need for a bigger TV is right here in our very hearts.

When our children go to music festivals they go in a group and close themselves away from opportunities to find new colours and shapes. We go to exotic countries to soak up the culture, but we wash it away as soon as we get home, retaining nothing more than the memory of how cheap the fake designer watches are.

Our governments dictate which land is on God’s side, and produces weapons and men to protect it. When the government changes its mind, the arms deals are already set in stone, and our men are killed by our own weapons, but it’s ok. It’s only business, and business creates jobs.

We hate and we fear and we despise. And we kill, we kill, we kill, while the wheels turn and grind their way into oblivion.

How strange that we can be clever enough to destroy this beauty, yet too stupid to see it happening.

©Jane Paterson Basil

A Bitter Victory

The government has declared its intention to place a blanket ban on all of the legal highs which are so irresponsibly sold to ignorant victims throughout this country.

dealers
who wilfully
continue to peddle
these lethal powders and pills
will risk seven years
imprisonment

This is our awaited victory
but it will not heal our sick nation
these abominations will still
insidiously spill
through the fingers of criminals
into the pockets
of the un-listening
in search of a chemical thrill
to take away their dissatisfaction
their disenfranchisement
and all of the other
disses that they feel

some of them will die and some will merely become ill.
their skin stick to their bones, or turn grey and wrinkle
some will see strange things which no-one else can see

worms under the skin

secret messages on old receipts

people watching them from rooftops

hidden enemies with weird agendas

some will jump off bridges to their deaths
some will merely cease breathing in their sleep
some will make it to a medical ward before expiring

some
will
survive

A statement by the home office informs us that the Bill’s purpose is: “to protect hard-working citizens from the risks posed by untested, unknown and potentially harmful drugs.”

And it shocks me to see those words so brazenly stated.
are the hardworking citizens the only people of significance?

What of the victims of abuse, of sickness and pain, of mental illness, of this self-righteous government’s callous methods of leadership which ignore the vulnerable?

What of those who have never managed to grab an opportunity because they are weaker than the rest?

And where is your gratitude, you members of parliament, you movers and shakers, you climbers to the top on the of the ladder, you well oiled, well educated, well-to-do upstanding members of the community?

Where is your gratitude, because somebody has to be downtrodden, down-at heel, down and out in this capitalist society in which you thrive, and if it wasn’t them, it could be you.

Your callous wording is another way of inciting the low paid to hate and dispise the unemployed and unemployable.

Those traumatised ex-servicemen
who fought your wars for you
were hardworking citizens before they
ran screaming from their families
to die in the dirt of the streets

Is this bill not intended to help preserve what is left of them?

Or perhaps you think that only ‘respectable’ individuals take legal highs – those smart university students who later graduate to city suits and a middle-class cocaine habit.

© Jane Paterson Basil