Thursday, July 5, 2012
COOL MEDITATION
Maybe it’s the fact that I’m pretty much on holiday now or maybe it’s just that I like my own voice too much to be content with a few lines on facefuck. Either way, I woke up today in unusually bright spirits but with a handful of solid reasons. No, I’m not elated and brimming with pride as a result of an old lady enjoying 60 years of totally unearned privilege, or championing the exploits of 11 men on a pitch who are good at kicking a piece of plastic around (although props to Spain, they were good innit!?!). Life, occasionally, can and should brim with optimism and positive thinking. If you wanna stay down in the dumps, stop reading. If you need a lift, spare a minute more…
Why be positive? Surely that’s not the done thing these days? Well, the first thing I wanna rant and rave about is the resounding victory of the British public in staving off the privatisation of public woodland. Reading up on this difficult campaign has reignited my faith in people. We’re meant to believe (if you follow the headlines of impending environmental disaster and financial melt-down) that we are a bunch of greedy cunts who want nothing more than to line our pockets and spend our pennies in hell. Well, fortunately not. Anyone who was involved in this campaign should give themselves and their colleagues a massive pat on the back, go for a long walk in the woods with a bottle of fermented grape juice, a mat and and snuggle up in the shade.
Another small but sufficient reason to be positive is to look at changing attitudes to plastic bag use. People are right to recognise that this issue is almost irrelevant in the larger climate change context; we’re not gonna save the world by transporting our booze in re-useable bags whilst industries pump their crap into the air uncontrolled. True say, but it must be seen as a symbolic step in the right direction. Big up all the Welsh and Irish who by law now have to pay 5p per bag, cutting down on plastic use whilst raising cash for environmental projects. Apparently Scotland is next, with England perhaps unsurprisingly coming in last.
Speaking about the environment, I for one am inspired by the recent protests in Peru opposing an contaminous open-cast gold mine which have put the authorities in a state of emergency. Unfortunately three people have died, but once again the South Americans are showing us what it really means to stand up to big businesses in defence of an unpoluted water supply. People everywhere are brave and have noble ideals, and continually disprove Adam Smith’s (the Godfather of neo-liberalism) claim that everyone is simply out for their own benefit at all times.
Taken in the grand scheme and history of humanity on the planet, these issues may seem isolated and insignificant, but I am inclined to see them as part of a much larger web. Life, as the first teaching of Buddhism goes, is hard. I agree, but let that not blind us to the goodness and virtue that exists in the world.
Stay positive! One love!!!
Monday, July 2, 2012
EMPTY HOUSES
Opposite the flat where I live there is a large empty room, whose windows are protected by an iron grate. It is a clean room with a tiled floor; I peer through the grate to double-check that there is no furniture to disturb the calm, no sign of human habitation.
Beneath my feet there is another empty room; no neighbour below to be disturbed by late-night jams, temper tantrums or sexual encounters. Maybe I should be glad. The neighbours on the right hand side are less than pleasant. As Sartre states ‘Hell is other people,’ or as a less well known philosopher (my Grandad, a retired electrician) also remarked,
‘What’s the hardest commandment to keep? ‘Love thy neighbour.’’
In spite of all this, something is nagging at my brain and finger-tips: people need houses. The recent proposal by British P.M. David Cameron to abolish housing benefits for the under 25s has stirred quite a reaction. I am writing from several thousand miles of physical distance, but his words still echo in my ears. I have lapped up indignant comments on The Guardian, lamenting the plight of the ‘feckless poor’ and read my friends’ thoughts on Fakebook. Cameron’s statements are shocking, and whilst I share the condemnation of the left-leaning press, I feel they are not looking at the bigger, more taboo issue at the centre of the debate; the existence of private property.
Wooooh! Steady on old boy! Before I get thrown onto the pile of looney-leftist cranks, allow a moment’s thought. One of my friends said that, in the light of the economic crisis, cutting benefits to the youth is ‘a good place to start’. Hmmmm. Let’s reflect on this idea of where something starts…
Animals need shelter. We, as I have to keep reminding myself and other people, are animals. Before losing ourselves in yields, bonds, bail-outs and crises, let’s not forget this simple truth. As animals we need somewhere to sleep, shit, make-love, make music, make a racket and make food. At least that’s what I’m mostly interested in doing in my house. Great, so as I found out after leaving uni and no-longer having the privilege of my folks paying my rent whilst I studied, I quickly realised that accommodation is both very expensive and necessary. Yikes!!! How did this become the case? Where did this begin?
If you ask Rousseau, he’d explain to you in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, that this is the result of a very stupid moment in human history. He states the most stupid man ever wasn’t the fella who moved into a cave, cut down some trees and put a fence around the scrub of land that surrounded it and said ‘This is mine!’. No, it wasn’t him, but it was the other fella, maybe a slightly hung-over caveman who’d been making-love, making music and making a racket the night before who believed him.
Now then, this is where I have to bring this all up to date. People who need houses the most are young people, those taking their first step to leave the nest. The importance of this metaphor shouldn’t be underestimated, because in age-to-life-expectancy terms, humans ‘leave the nest’ at a relatively advanced age compared to most other animals. The idea then that people aged 16-25 are somehow indulging themselves by (how dare they) wanting to move out in this ‘culture of entitlement’, is a crock of shit. This is the first battle that needs to be won; young people are not spoilt, they simply want their material needs to be met, as all young members of a species do.
So the state is not going to help people leave the nest. Why? There are ample empty houses in the UK – 930,000 according to the charity Empty Homes, who base their statistics on council tax databases. Now I’m not one for statistics, but check out this little beauty from the government’s own website, parliament.uk. ‘In the period February-April 2012, 1.01 million young people aged 16-24 were unemployed.’ Right, so we could almost provide not just a single room but an entire house to each young person who is unemployed. I’m sure that a few of them wouldn’t mind sharing as well; let’s be honest, whilst you might like having a house to yourself so you can avoid that awkward moment of opening the unlocked bathroom door to find your new flat-mate taking a juicy number two, most of us enjoy the company of our peers.
So, why isn’t there the political will to find inhabitants for all these empty homes? The answer is that at the heart of this entire system lies the concept of private property. Unlike the Native American saying ‘The only piece of land you own is the land under your mat when you go to sleep at night’, some people in the West think that they have some God-given right to own vast areas of land and property. Notice that I haven’t once mentioned the word money. This argument is simply not about how much or how little money we have; it’s about the natural resources available to us and our ability to control them – agency. Now, agency is in the hands of private individuals and corporations, backed to the hilt by the public relations department of big business (the government) and their henchmen (the police and armed forces). So, unfortunately for the likes of you and me who despite all this madness still need a place to shit, sing and shower, we have little choice but to comply.
Or do we? We don’t own the houses, and the people who are supposed to represent us don’t want us to live in the empty ones unless someone else makes a profit. Tricky situation. One of the answers, to go back to ‘the start’ of the problem, would be to make that radical, historically unprecedented decision to no longer believe that these things are owned by others in the first place. As the poem/prayer Desiderata states, ‘You are a child of the universe; no less then the trees and the stars you have a right to be here.’ Continuing with our scatological imagery, we could just as well say ‘you have a right to poo here.’
And you do! We do! If private rents are too high and the state isn’t going to provide for our basic needs, then we as citizens, as ‘children of the universe’, have a RIGHT to make our own homes or use the empty ones literally lying around us. That’s why I give my full support to the squatting movement that exists at the periphery of our society. Hats off to the people who occupied a totally empty block of flats in a suburb of Seville after being kicked out of their homes because they didn’t keep up on mortgage payments. ‘Outrageous and unfair’ some may say, but they have done more than just provide for their material needs: they have brought into question the whole idea of private property, which even the liberal press is unwilling to contemplate, and started to readdress the most stupid moment of human history.
Beneath my feet there is another empty room; no neighbour below to be disturbed by late-night jams, temper tantrums or sexual encounters. Maybe I should be glad. The neighbours on the right hand side are less than pleasant. As Sartre states ‘Hell is other people,’ or as a less well known philosopher (my Grandad, a retired electrician) also remarked,
‘What’s the hardest commandment to keep? ‘Love thy neighbour.’’
In spite of all this, something is nagging at my brain and finger-tips: people need houses. The recent proposal by British P.M. David Cameron to abolish housing benefits for the under 25s has stirred quite a reaction. I am writing from several thousand miles of physical distance, but his words still echo in my ears. I have lapped up indignant comments on The Guardian, lamenting the plight of the ‘feckless poor’ and read my friends’ thoughts on Fakebook. Cameron’s statements are shocking, and whilst I share the condemnation of the left-leaning press, I feel they are not looking at the bigger, more taboo issue at the centre of the debate; the existence of private property.
Wooooh! Steady on old boy! Before I get thrown onto the pile of looney-leftist cranks, allow a moment’s thought. One of my friends said that, in the light of the economic crisis, cutting benefits to the youth is ‘a good place to start’. Hmmmm. Let’s reflect on this idea of where something starts…
Animals need shelter. We, as I have to keep reminding myself and other people, are animals. Before losing ourselves in yields, bonds, bail-outs and crises, let’s not forget this simple truth. As animals we need somewhere to sleep, shit, make-love, make music, make a racket and make food. At least that’s what I’m mostly interested in doing in my house. Great, so as I found out after leaving uni and no-longer having the privilege of my folks paying my rent whilst I studied, I quickly realised that accommodation is both very expensive and necessary. Yikes!!! How did this become the case? Where did this begin?
If you ask Rousseau, he’d explain to you in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, that this is the result of a very stupid moment in human history. He states the most stupid man ever wasn’t the fella who moved into a cave, cut down some trees and put a fence around the scrub of land that surrounded it and said ‘This is mine!’. No, it wasn’t him, but it was the other fella, maybe a slightly hung-over caveman who’d been making-love, making music and making a racket the night before who believed him.
Now then, this is where I have to bring this all up to date. People who need houses the most are young people, those taking their first step to leave the nest. The importance of this metaphor shouldn’t be underestimated, because in age-to-life-expectancy terms, humans ‘leave the nest’ at a relatively advanced age compared to most other animals. The idea then that people aged 16-25 are somehow indulging themselves by (how dare they) wanting to move out in this ‘culture of entitlement’, is a crock of shit. This is the first battle that needs to be won; young people are not spoilt, they simply want their material needs to be met, as all young members of a species do.
So the state is not going to help people leave the nest. Why? There are ample empty houses in the UK – 930,000 according to the charity Empty Homes, who base their statistics on council tax databases. Now I’m not one for statistics, but check out this little beauty from the government’s own website, parliament.uk. ‘In the period February-April 2012, 1.01 million young people aged 16-24 were unemployed.’ Right, so we could almost provide not just a single room but an entire house to each young person who is unemployed. I’m sure that a few of them wouldn’t mind sharing as well; let’s be honest, whilst you might like having a house to yourself so you can avoid that awkward moment of opening the unlocked bathroom door to find your new flat-mate taking a juicy number two, most of us enjoy the company of our peers.
So, why isn’t there the political will to find inhabitants for all these empty homes? The answer is that at the heart of this entire system lies the concept of private property. Unlike the Native American saying ‘The only piece of land you own is the land under your mat when you go to sleep at night’, some people in the West think that they have some God-given right to own vast areas of land and property. Notice that I haven’t once mentioned the word money. This argument is simply not about how much or how little money we have; it’s about the natural resources available to us and our ability to control them – agency. Now, agency is in the hands of private individuals and corporations, backed to the hilt by the public relations department of big business (the government) and their henchmen (the police and armed forces). So, unfortunately for the likes of you and me who despite all this madness still need a place to shit, sing and shower, we have little choice but to comply.
Or do we? We don’t own the houses, and the people who are supposed to represent us don’t want us to live in the empty ones unless someone else makes a profit. Tricky situation. One of the answers, to go back to ‘the start’ of the problem, would be to make that radical, historically unprecedented decision to no longer believe that these things are owned by others in the first place. As the poem/prayer Desiderata states, ‘You are a child of the universe; no less then the trees and the stars you have a right to be here.’ Continuing with our scatological imagery, we could just as well say ‘you have a right to poo here.’
And you do! We do! If private rents are too high and the state isn’t going to provide for our basic needs, then we as citizens, as ‘children of the universe’, have a RIGHT to make our own homes or use the empty ones literally lying around us. That’s why I give my full support to the squatting movement that exists at the periphery of our society. Hats off to the people who occupied a totally empty block of flats in a suburb of Seville after being kicked out of their homes because they didn’t keep up on mortgage payments. ‘Outrageous and unfair’ some may say, but they have done more than just provide for their material needs: they have brought into question the whole idea of private property, which even the liberal press is unwilling to contemplate, and started to readdress the most stupid moment of human history.
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