(Coincidentally, or not, the name of a Frank Turner album).
I don’t consider myself to be political in any way, but I would never not vote.
Voting may be meaningless and ludicrous and pandering to the powerful and a forlorn hope to make a difference but a world without voting would be worse than that surely?
I have watched with incredible disbelief how the world has descended in the last 5 or 10 years into isolation, frustration and individualism beyond comprehension which perhaps was never brought into more clear contrast than in the last few days of the election in the United States.
What seems sadder to me is that the people of the UK don’t really appreciate that we are verging on the 52th state of the United States of America.
We embrace Americana and have embraced Americana for at least the past 40 years without thought of any consequence that this might bring.
When you travel to France it is not the same as the UK and it’s very different to the United States of America.
The USA has become the lens through which we are able to look at ourselves and to see whether we are going in the correct direction or not.
I had the enormous privilege of an educational experience beyond value when I studied in Texas in the 1990’s as an undergraduate.
There is no question that it changed me and shaped my future self beyond much more than anything else had in my previous educational experience.
What I saw in Texas and what I reflected on afterwards disgusted me and frightened me and made me vow to be different to that.
I don’t believe things have got any better there.
I don’t believe things have got any better here.
On a global scale we can do nothing to make things any better.
We can't fix the rise in nationalism and we can't fix the rise in individualism and we can't fix the rise in the advancement of right wing groups or the advancement of left wing groups, all of whom seem hellbent on resorting to the most extraordinary short tactics to be heard.
We can do nothing about this on a global scale but we can do everything about it on an individual scale.
We can look at the result of the election in the United States and hope (beyond hope) that it marks a turning point to a more reasonable way to approach power in politics (but I fear it will not).
We can give up and be nihilistic and stick our heads in the sand and hide in our bedrooms and hope that it will go away (but it won’t).
Or we could take a different route.
I read the other day that smoking in males over 18 has dropped from almost 45% in the 1980’s to less than 17% in the 2020’s (that is a result).
Imagine we looked at kindness as a metric in the same way.
Imagine we had a strategy to be kinder to ourselves and to the people around us and to the planet around us too, imagine we increased kindness by 50% over the next 5 years.
Imagine that started by you trying to be more kind each day to the people around you and by me doing the same.
It’s rubbish isn’t it, it never earns more money, it never buys more cars and houses and things from amazon, it will never work.
Perhaps though in the midst of the Covid winter when all people are beginning to crave is human contact and the value of kindness will go up.
We have to do something and politics isn’t doing it, the only thing we can control is our own behaviour and one of the main behaviours that will make a difference is kindness.
Blog Post Number - 2549
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