Parallels

Continuing an established trend for late blog, early blog, here's today's bitter short edition.

Parallels

Y’know, when I look at the state of the world, the omnishambles that is Iraq, the images of children born in Fallujah without fully developed brains or no head or with multiple arms sprouting out of each other like the branches on a tree because of the amount of depleted uranium that has been left to infect that town; when I see that no-one at HSBC was sent to jail for laundering drug money, nor no-one from BP in jail for the Deep Water Horizon disaster; when I see ex US service personnel forced, homeless, on to the streets as America’s military budget increases to engulf 57% of total government spending, or read the British government’s own statistics, which state that 10,000 additional disabled people died from heart attack, suicide and neglect in the first 10 months of means testing by ATOS, or that £1.2 million was wasted on a public funeral for Margaret Thatcher (despite this contravening the law on the glorification of terrorism), when there isn’t enough money to provide Job Centre staff with things like Post-It notes or their clients with plastic wallets for their dole booklets; when I see Dick Cheney and Tony Blair walking free upon this Earth, when there are now more African-Americans in prison for trivial offenses than were enslaved at the time of the outbreak of the American Civil War, where peaceful protesters are tear gassed on streets the world over and the NSA and GCHQ spy on citizens in their own homes; where a man’s right to own and operate an assault weapon is sacrosanct, but a woman’s right to do what she wants with her own body must be abrogated at all costs; where socialism is a sin and democracy divine, so long as you never, ever, under any circumstances, try to enforce its principles; where the most corrupt, least capable govern and where the one most vociferously waving the flag is invariably the most traitorous of all; when I see this and so much more, I can only come to the darkly funny, geekily bleak conclusion that we must be living in the version of events where George Bailey was never born. Or the version of ‘Back to the Future Part II’ where Marty McFly never gets the sports almanac back from Biff. Or maybe this is the Mirror Universe in Star Trek and somewhere out in the cosmos there is a good version of Earth, where things worked out for the better. Because I can’t, in all consciousness, accept that this is the best we can do. So we need to seek out George, Marty, Kirk, or, more likely, some female equivalent, ‘cause that would seem more appropriate, right, in an alternate universe where equality actually exists, and help them do what they need to do; restore the timeline, reset everything to zero, wake up from whatever nightmare or hallucination it is that we’re currently living through. With even more heart than ever, I sign off with the usual words…

Get it Done.