Passsing The Time

Reading a book is a fine way to the pass the day,
perticularly when what we read proves informative,
as is listenng to speech radio when the news cycle
is not saturated with events that are trailed that often
that the viewer can no longer cope with being told
the news story as is finally digested by the news cyle.

What both share is that they address the past,
whether recently or long ago, which we reread
as something to what we once thought it to be,
that gets us as close as we dare place ourselves
towards imagining what the future might be. 

The Slow Decay Of Democracy

will not be noticed when it happens.
Citizens will be far too taken up
by the effusive greetings, flummery
and shiny new statesmanship, before
becoming aghast at how amateurish
and undiplomatic diplomacy has become
for them to notice when the state
they used to support has been subsumed
into being the coterie of male billionaires
who see their wealth and gender
as the qualifier for all future leadership,
when what their wealth actually proves
is how monoplies can de-nature the talent
and vitality of a democratic system
and devalue the vote to make it worth
less than the paper the ballot is written on.

If this has nor happened in your country yet,
then watch for the early signs of it happening.

It is difficult to reverse the process when it takes hold.

Between Despair And Insanity.

When is it right to despar
of the country you live in?
When you can't tell the difference
between the local sewage industry
and campaigns to renew local democracy:
both have heavily broken delivery systems
that leak very badly. Both smell 'off', toxic.

Particularly when the democracy smells of money,
particularly crypto currency, and presents itself
as the kind of near future many people can read
as long as they think it is that future is for somebody
they don't know of, to live out. There the future
is a lengthy science fiction dystopia, or the despair
of a one of the fourt major Old Testsament prophets.

Whoever follows the sense of loss 
has to choose what distance to keep from it,
to preserve their sense of their sanity.   

The Scale Of My Ambitions

was set so low they did not seem like ambition
at all: I was meant to imitate my parents, and live
within the material means they provided,
accept as a given the second hand uniforms,
and inatentively accept my inatentive schooling.

There it did not matter if I, or anyone else,
'did badly', the teachers got jobs out of it,
parents got their children minded, whilst
the pretence was they were being taught.
The parents could work and live less impeded
by them being parents. My invite was more
to be ignored, then to be valued, anyway. 

Through being me, I failed even the low level
of attemtion/expected achievement expected of me:
to slot myself into place underneath my parents
as part of local life , as a pre-shrunk ready fit adult.

By the time I was set to seek work,
training had been separated from jobs,
employers were paid to train trainees,
but did not employ those they trained,
who nobody wanted. When I applied for local jobs
I stood no chance: employers wanted married women
who would work for less, and stay, however bored
they might get. They had children to clothe and feed,
the way I had been, indifferently, over the last decade.

I was expected to apply for jobs
I was unlikely to get, with alacrity.

Since I had none, I thought education was the ecsape route.
It seemed like a good thing for keeping me occupied,
even if it did not do for me what it was said to do for others: 
make the educated more trainable/employable.

'Too little effort applied too late' would be what employers
thought when I applied for jobs with what I'd learned. 
What that really meant was that I, or my parents, 
had not been competitive enough to demand for me
what employers wanted: I had the wrong family background.

I escaped this catch 22 situation when I found temporary work
in another town. and worked until the temp work ran dry.
With my time being my own I did personal development work,
where in my isolation I improvised who I thought I wanted to be.

If I had understood what the word 'lossleader' meant
-a thing is sold for much less than it is worth, to inspire
cheap grace in future-I would have written myself off,
by agreement with those whp mis-sold the future
to who they felt they needed to sell it to, far far earlier.

What did not kill me made me stranger.

Hubris Heights

From Pharoahs Egypt to modern times,
authoritarian government is the oldest form
of government we know of, though experiments
like democracy were tried, and have been revived.
Key to any government from Theocracy, military state,
to democratic experiment central to them all
is how centralised via bureaucracy is the state?

The pharaohs of Egypt were among the earliest
that achieved high degrees of centalisation.
It is an irony of history that their fame
comes from their former slaves, the Jews.
Who had refined their own centralised
contradictions, on their own, as if how detached
the Jews were from their own internal mechanics
could be disguised, whateve the centralisation
of later empires in Babylon, Greece, Rome, even Islam,
each has left their mark on a world history, the Jews
have unexpectaedly outlived all but one of them.

But  the bigger any human hierarchy gets
the less humane, it becomes, and bigger
the memory of their empires remains,
but as a graveyard  of dimished civilations past.

And even the Jews,
as they embrace Hubris,
may yet join them.  

Signs Of Greater Age (45)

1-Getting a sense of Dejavu
when looking through the books
in charity and second hand shops
because the best titles you find
are books you read when younger,
and bought at a higher price, prior
to seeing them for less elswhere
not thinking the book might appear
in places you did not expect them to.

2-Still having heroes when you are older
but the older you get the more your heroes
who are alive, and older than yourself
are harder to find, and the most sustainable
heroes exist outside of time-in myth and history. 

3-Unthinkingly thanking Alexa
and those like her after they have done
something you asked them to do:
forgetting that 'she' does not have a gender,
is not human, and grattitude is wasted on her.
But even misplaced grattitude lifts you up
when it helps you forgive mistakes better.      

Formula For The Future

for humans will soon be fore-shortened
as global warming + AI = mass extinction
followed by mass unemployment,
world poverty, and the end of human reason.