On the trip to Scotland with Callum that I blogged about yesterday we went into town to buy a football so that he could play on the astroturf.
I decided to show him around on a tour of my old haunts in Greenock which is the slightly larger town next to the smaller town of Gourock where I was brought up as a boy for the first 22 years of my life.
I must live some terrible, sheltered and restricted existence because what I saw as we walked through the mall was grim indeed.
I have done ‘mall shopping’ in America, in the cathedrals of capitalism and consumerism that they call their shopping malls.
The Green Oak Mall shopping centre in Greenock is quite something else.
To start with, every second shop is boarded up, businesses and dreams that people had which have been extinguished in a wave of poverty.
The shops that remain seem not to be selling anything of any value to anyone, yet still people turn up and try and grab a bargain for Christmas.
This is where the haunts of my youth and these were the areas that I came to with my friends and sauntered through, even though it probably looked like this only a little bit less bad.
I moved on and moved away but I return to see exactly what’s happening to society at it’s sharpest possible point.
While in some parts of the world people buy crystal bracelets and designer clothes and expensive coffee machines and cars and watches, half of society is here trying to eke out an existence.
What’s happened in the past 2 years has made this worse and what will happen in the next 2 years will make it worse again.
Every time you click on amazon to buy a product, you push the pendulum just a little bit further towards the Green Oak Mall in Greenock.
My mum told me when I returned back that they’ve decided to bulldoze half of the mall because people are travelling 15 miles away to shop instead.
And so, societies and communities are broken and die but still half the population are left to live there.
Blog Post Number - 2959
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