The Vaccine

That will prevent humans
from being stupid
has yet to invented.

All the vaccines
our science has created,
including the Covid vaccines,
merely spread our ignorance
further out from where it started. 

The Necessity Of Discomfort

Some stories should never reassure us,
because the truths they have to tell
are not written to make the book sell,
they are written to make us more aware
of the history of human discomfort
that others have been made to endure. 

Danger; Normality At Work

Most of us seem normal
to others who don't know us.

If we remain that way
after saying we know each other 
and being friends
then how we are known 
should be reason for worry.

Kierkagaard Never Lived Through A Pandemic

But for good and ill he knew terror,
and the anguish where his everyday life, 
other people proved their foolishness to him
in their misuse of commonplace reason.

Where he found faith to be about an obedience
that was deep thought out, and highly personal,
he also found people around him had no interest.

And for us today we find it hard to believe,
less in the Christianity that he aspired to believe in,
more in how easy it is for any of us to become the carriers
 of the virus, Covid 19, in which it is even harder 
 to obey the rules that stop it spreading.

But the example and absurdity of Kierkagaard's life
could have warned us that to not trust other people
we have first to learn to not trust jn ourselves....

 

Reversing Into The Future

The music that was recorded on 78' rpm discs, from the 1890's to the 1960's, is rather like silent film.

Vast amounts of both were made around the world and they were universally enjoyed, they embodied popular culture. Nearly as vast amounts of same were discarded and lost before they could be preserved as part of the history of the medium they were part of as popular culture moved on.

But both silent film and 78 rpm records are part of the history of human culture and part of human history, period.

Please enjoy the music in the following link. and words and the music in the following article.

Nil Carborundum

One of the phrases I recently heard,
after not hearing it for many years, was
'If voting changed anything it would be abolished.'.

It is a phrase most associated in the British press
with former Lord, turned radical English Socialist,
Anthony Wedgwood Benn (1925-2014)
who said it often, and always
when he did not get the change he wanted.

He was a man with a tireless appetite for change.
This appetite seemed to increase,
the fewer the changes that were happening around him
and the more what change there was
was change that was 'going in the wrong direction'.

He was a man who strongly believed
in the representative democracy of the UK
widening who it represented
and being increasingly accurate
in how that representation worked,
thus making The New Jerusalem
of British Socialism a reality that endures
whilst banishing the blues of poverty,
and the blue of Conservatism, to History.

But apply the phrase to an earlier era
and the effect is not quite the same.
The suffragettes fought pitch battles,
protested in public and were force fed
in prison to end their hunger strikes.
Some martyred themselves for the cause
of extending the franchise to women.

Tell them that they would gain nothing,
and nothing would change for them getting the vote 
and what did they have left of their protest about
beyond merely protesting for the right to protest?

Votes are votes, and votes matter,
particularly where they are proof
that those in power have listened
and they will extend justice further. 

But in the absence of votes,
and the absence of change,
protest is all people have left
which however temporary it is
and however short the feeling
it gives of people feeling alive. 

Picture Set Of The Month - February - Modern Life Is Rubbish

Glass, Seattle 2004 

Oil Filters, Seattle 2003

Crushed cars #2, Tacoma 2004

Spent bullet casings, 2005

Cell phones #2, Atlanta 2005

Circuit boards #2, New Orleans 2005

All the above photos, and more in a similar vein,
 are from here.