Tonight-Brent TUSC

Tonight-Brent TUSC

An Activist’s Journal-Bright Moments

I planned after family and friends celebrating my eldest daughters 21st birthday on sunday,that when i returned home,i would do some of that ever present and often quite banal activity that underpins the more obvious an sometimes public aspects of my activism.I was however thwarted by complete breakdown of connectivity,which reveals each time it happens how dependent i(maybe we)become on each new wave of new technology.So it all”goes west”and gets delayed……and some of it is overdue and elayed anyway,sometimes by my procrastination but more often by helath problems or other features of reality,including inn recent days the hot weather.

i would not dare complain but  the high temperatures,bright light and even the rain today,which raise the humidity brings me to a standstill.i think,but i don’t know that it in some way”excites”the pollution so my eyes ache and stream,my breathing is clogged which is really uncomfortable and the bright light is blinding……

Yesterday,it was my daughters birthday,so i spend time at home doing not much in particular except enjoying their company.I went out for lunch with a friend who has kindly given me a replacement mobile phone,after mine,reputedly”serious kit”broke down.i find myself now making no progress in getting that repaired,and thats its far inferior substitute has also simply both been difficult to work and now refuses to work.This is complicated by in my opinion the attitude of the company,which brings out the curmudgeon in me.I suspect that once they have our money they are less interested in anything else.Indeed when i talked to someone yesterday,who seemed unwilling and unable to connect me to the person or department i need,her answer to my request for help was to want to sell me something else and i’m aware that this sort of material has now become the substance of certain comedians routines.I go”bah!humbug!!and put it down to a feature and function of capitalism.

Connectivity is better but its not good,and my friend tells me that this could be the weather.So this technology is again not perfect,but suject to internal quirks and the impact of external factors,like too much heat and too much rain,which should mean in this country that nothing ever works.I had indeed been anxious that said connectivity rpoblems would prevent communication with both my friend and several other people seeking my help.

So i try to deal with those enquiries,both campaign issues and people in distress as best i can.

Today,whilst progress is always slow(er),i suspect because i have slowed down,and because my self expectation is always higher than i actually manage,i seem to be getting through quite an amount of stuff.The highlight of the day,should be a meeting tonight of Brent TUSC,which will be addressed by several much better known speakers than myself but at which i guess i will make more public than before that i am willing to stand as a TUSC candidate in the next local council elections.That meeting will as always provide yet more organising opportunities in relation to both TUSC itself locally and some of the other issues i am involved with.

At this point in the day i don’t suppose there is much else i can do to prepare for it,except to look after my own needs now-sometimes activity preoccupies me so that i forget to eat for example.Other than that i guess it is at times like now that the tension and nervousness might set in.It is at such times that i seek to centre myself,though that probbaly sounds more pretensious than it is,and to “call in”energy from others.If the reader is not of a spiritual persuasion,i guess that comes down to some sort of desire for”good luck”,which frankly always strikes me as more bizarre than asking for or making prayers or similar practices.The other side of that excercise is good for any of us,in moments of doubt,self-doubt or feelings of isolation,to recognise how others contribute to our activity,by say giving us food,driving us,or just wishing us that good luck,thought,affection or prayer.I believe that these are material,concrete transactions-it need not be mystical for the exchange of words or feelings however subtle or small does perhaps galvanise or buoy me/us up/forward.

Now we can only await the outcome tonight.

d1/23072013

 

 

 

 

 

An Activist’s Journal-Unfortunately a weekend does not go on forever

To pick up from where i left off,it is disturbing to hear from the woman who talked about her homeless friend that we will now try to help,also told us that in 2014 the council intend to demolish the block she lives in!.the block is lowrise,and not that old.It has,i think been renovated in recent years.So,she asks,where will she go next?Exactly….

We will do more than ponder that>i return home and send some of the evening following up on all the background work that keeps the outer face,the street and public presence of campaigns going.i get an email reply from a woman in another borough also struggling with bedroom tax and other issues,kindly passed on to me by another friend and comrade in our campaign.i write on facebook and elsewhere,with some silly quips,and as always some music.Its 3am and i think of all those details i still have to deal with,though i am NOT complaining-this is NOT the stuff i evade……but like everyone i’m fallible and too much slips through….

Today i haul myself up relatively early and as well as writing-this indeed-there are domestic chores,before my eldest daughter celebrates her 21st birthday,a day early,and despite 18 now being the year that people pass into formal but notional adulthood,21 is still a key date for a lot of people.Some family and friends fun…..

Then i suspect the evening could combine relaxation and recovery(is that RnR?)and more of the background stuff of life and campaigning,as we enter another week.

i wonder if i can keep this up?…the journal,not the campaigning!the campaigning is a given.Like comrades and friends,like Paula Peters,who also manages to write almost daily on Facebook,i cannot imagine life without it

d1/21072013

 

 

An Activists Journal-It’s the Weekend!

Having obtained early,medical retirement last winter(January 2012),the difference between the weekend and the weekdays,let alone a working week are much vaguer again for me these days.Nevertheless,its the weekend-and a lighter note,knowing that however busy i and others are,it at least feels that our choices are a bit more free than during our working schedules.i do of course recognise that many,perhaps a majority of the working masses don’t conform to that simple division of time,and that includes many of my friends and comrades.

i get up later most days than i used to when i was straightforwardly a wage slave.This is not laziness.I have i think reverted to what is hopefully a more natural rhythm for my own body-that i function better later in the day.The other main reason relates to why i got early retirement-that i am no longer as resilient as i used to be,and to my own frustration it takes its toll.

I say to people that when i feel very unwell i revert to being like a 5 year old dependent,perhaps miserable boy child,who needs his mother.Usually,inside  my head I’m still that eager adolescent,of 17 years old,eager to be out there and active in the world,and who with the curiosity of that 17 year old,i don’t like missing anything.Physically i’m 59,and on a bad day it feels like 70,but i try,i hope without pretension to have a still youthful outlook on the world.

My physical and mental condition does mean that i have to take more care and time orienzing to the world when i get up.So Saturday,i make and early start for me.I can work on the computer/internet whilst i have a cup of coffee and take some of my medicines and orient on the world.

A message from my friend,comrade,companion that she is is leafletting at one of the local hospitals today.I smile.Its till not clear whether she will show up in Kilburn where i am headed but never mind.It will be good if we end up in the same place.If not i will miss her.I find other messages,about whether i have leaflets and suggesting a conversation with  one of them.

i get the bus to Wembley and find my TUSC(Trades Union and Socialist Coalition)comrades,leafletting for our local meeting on Tuesday coming,and selling The Socialist,as they are both in the Socialist Party.I am not a member  but its certainly not a problem for me,nor i believe,them.They are friends and comrades to me.It feels to me that we get along politically and personally well.We work together and we debate what we disagree about,which is surprisingly little.For me,the work drives us and in some ways is more important.These are not times for argument for its own sake,and certainly not simply to score points,or as far as i’m concerned to make ourselves feel superior.

So,i have a somewhat intense discussion with the comrade i know best,probably distracting him from his immediate tasks,but most of the conversation is of some importance and relates to our tasks in the next few days.

Realising i’m beginning to run late,i charge off to Kilburn Park on the train,and begin to write my journal entry on the way.as i get off the train,i hear my name called and see another comrade smiling at me,that she is off to an event to celebrate the Cuban Revolution,60 years ago soemwhere else in central London.As i surface i find 2 more comrades>one has brought the leaflets,the campaign banner and the rest of the impedimenta for what we are about to do in relation to the Counihan-Sanchez Housing Campaign.As we are joined by another comrade,one has to leave for more mundane business but i always take the view that we all do what we can and that no-one should guilt trip themselves or into each other into what we cannot manage.He is anyway,a highly committed friend and comrade who pours a lot of his talent into this campaign.Three of us set off to the South Kilburn Estate and its a chance to share news,catch up with one another and talk abot what we are about to do.I like their company anyway.Not long after arriving,our comrade who had left us a little while before  gives us a call-to offer me his spare mobile,as mine has broken down.I am grateful and once again struck by his generosity anmongst his other qualities.Beset by difficulties,and with limited resources,he nevertheless gives freely.As always it is those with little,to give them alift in life who give most and most freely.this is a quality of the poor,the oppressed,the working class,that whilst we cannot assume nor take for granted is very much there and which is a further indicator of how little the ruling class know or understand of us and our class.We reach the estate,and after a little difficulty,we gain entry to one of the blocks/towers of apartments.This one has about 30 maisonette apartments.This is the bread and butter,nuts and bolts,basics of the campaign-knocking on doors and talking to people.We are here simply to find out what is troubling people and hopefully to find people not simply to jin tne campaign but to be our “eyes and ears”so that we can offer support and solidarity to our sisters and brothers.Mostly people are out,though i suspect some pretend to be or can’t be bothered to open the doors to us and at one level who can blame them.So at the very least,i make a note and we drop in 2 leaflets at each door-one about the campaign,and another about the public meeting to begin planning preparing an organised anti-cuts platform in next years locale elections.My spanish speaking comrade comes to my aid when i meet a man who speaks Arabic and Spanish but not english.Later she engages another man in along conversation-but then that is what we are here for.Lastly,we meet a woman who is helping a friend,from Spain with 2 small children who is homeless-deemed”intentionally homeless”by a neighboruing borough,eseentially because she left Spain,probably driven out by austerity and crisis there and probably looking for work here,which however bad it seems has not yet felt the full brunt of austerity unlike Spain.it is not that Britain is superior,but probably reflects that it is indeed the oldest capitalist economy in the world and at least appears to have had a more stable recent political history,so that our social infrastructure is more firmly established,more elaborated,and indeed more conservative in some respects.

I suspect that my comrades,like myself react inside our heads,knowing that we have come across another example of the banal cruelty of this system,this austerity,this crisis.We know we have to help and none of us hesitate.We talk to her about doing so and how.

We decide to move on.We take no pleasure in others distress but our conversation particularly with this woman is heartening and confirms our purpose.I suspect that it is in our natures somehow that we are at some level confirmed in our social identity by the way we relate to others difficulty-though we are not saints or saintly,just relatively ordinary people.It makes us and those we relate to an work with no less special or important.We walk back to Kilburn Park an 2 of us go for coffee at our favourite cafe on the High Road.We can’t leaflet because we simply don’t have enough leaflets left.On our way to the cafe we pass Nuala,sitting outside a very straneg but local landmark-a chapel/church,that she persuades us to take a look inside.Outside it is battleship grey corrugated iron,but very much a church.They need to raise £250,000 for it to be preserved by/as English Heritage.It is associated with some sort of sea cadet corp,but nevetherless it is a shock to find that it is like the deck of a warship and right in front of us is a bofors anti-aircraft gun where i would expect and altar table to be.Above it is a bridge like structure from which awould be captain would see and command everything.The denomination does not matter but like most churches-its structure reproduces the relationship of the state to the people with an internal hierarchy in which the place of priest and/or god dominates and commands us.Whilst i am a believer,i decsribe following a spiritual path rather than a religion because i specifically reject those relations.For me,perhaps it is more”god with us”rather than god or the state over us….

On our way to the cafe my comrade remarks that she will probably see me write something,probably quirky,i think she says on my postings about this incident-so here it si comrade!

We spend about and hour in the cafe talking about lots of things,mainly life,politics,people we know,though i don’t think either of us gossip.Then we need to move on,and go our separate ways until next time.We go home.The day is not over for me,but i will pick up the rest along with the new day later.

d1/21072013

 

 

Calendars,Diaries,Journals-Some Rules of Thumb

I don’t think i can call the following definitions or rules,so”Rules of Thumb”will have to do…

I guess a calendar is a list of commitments,appointments and things to do set essentially into the future.So i would see a diary as that calendar when it has fallen into the past,including a commentary on and/or thoughts about those events.Whist some have sought to  set up rules and procedures about journals and journalling,i have  amuch more rough hewn approach.For me,my journal integrates all  of the above and a lot more>it has some coherence and a date order but it mixes all kinds of things,and is often a vey private place.Allsaid and done,i thought i might start adding,thouggh not neccessarilly absolutely regularly some kind of activist journal to my blog(s),and other websites on which i write.

Lets see how it goes,i make no promises,i make no prisoners of myself nor anyone else either.Take that as you like,although it is not a confrontation-it might be a challenge for both of us.

d1/20072013

 

Psychology-just a thought or two?

I’m struck increasingly that particularly in my activist life,which is an increasing part of my life again,its not just politics and the social,in all its aspects that are important,but psychology too…….in  a whole variety of ways that i will undoubtedly talk about more on my blog in future.

One of those ways is the way in which a variety of psychological theories an approaches develop dichotomies and spectrums in their analyses or as their analytical tools.Perhaps,and i have not checked this i’m thinking of say Jung’s Analytical Psychology,Enneagram theory and Wilhelm Reich,etc.although i’m not particularly linking those approaches in any unitary fashion.

In a populist form this sometimes comes out in newspapers and magazines that offer a kind of questionnaire or testing procedure as a route to say personality type,but it has more serious forms and uses too.

One such dichotomy is for me a tension between intellect and emotion.It is a tension for me,for at least two reasons.Sometimes,maybe often it seems to me such dichotomies are a way of increasing the stereotyping of people,so women often get seen as more emotional,and men as more intellectual.That said,and without wishing to collude with such stereotyping,that i reject,it seems to me that often the two things ARE seperated in order to tarin,socialise our gender/sexual identities in different ways.Rather than men being more intellectual,and women more emotional by nature,i suggest that is the way certain forms of capitalist society would have it.I suspect that class and particularly capitalist society might want,encourage,prefer it that way so that woemn can be made or kept subservient,always the carers,and that men are trained into”cold”intellect,where intellect excercisse power over emotion,head over heart,and that we men end up being divided from,alienated from our own emotions,denied our emotional intelligence.

The other dimension for me,is that i never want to accept the terms of the question.I refuse it.I claim little or nothing that is special about myself-it is not false humility that leads me to say and to believe i am just an ordinary man.I like to think however that i am quirky,a fully paid up member of the”awkward squad”,what psychiatric assessments of me have described as eccentric.In that sense its not difficult to embrace my own melancholy,alienation,awkwardness and shyness as a gift.

When i have asked myself this question about the emotion/intellect dichotomy in the past i struggle with an answer.It remains the case now.Actually,i like to think that at another level,in another way the tension dissappears-because i do not experience emotion and intellect as contradictory most of the time,and i suspect the tension arises because of the nature of the particular conumdrum or problem i mignt be facing at any particular time,not from anatural tension fom emotion and intellect themselves.Perhaps the notion of dialectic is part of,if not all the explanation.For its seems to me that firstly,thesis and antithesis lead to synthesis,which of course can lead to another level of paradox.equally,it seems to me,that when i feel something,exploring and analysing it allows some constructive unity and forward movement.

At each end point,i feel like a lucky man-that in my emotions i have so many tears:it reminds me that i am still very much alive,it enables me to hold on to what i hope is tenderness and affection.Thought and analysis does not analyse those feelings away.f anything it heightens them and sharpens them,and in the struggle i refine and learn too.

it enables me to confirm my simple concern with my sisters and brothers in humankind,and  to sign myself in”love and  rage”,lost….however lost or found i might be.

Like the title of the blog says:”LOSTbutnotreturning”.i do not want to come back.

d1/20072013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Woke up this morning……

“Woke up this morning…..”is the classic,opening words of  a number of blues songs.That said this piece is less about the songs,the music than it is the blues.In  talking about the blues,i guess i am going to shuffle up to it sideways on rather than directly.

Those words might well be how i would start a description of most if  not any day over the last week or two.

 

I developed what may have been my first episode of clinical depression in the summer of 2002,over a decade ago.One of the features of clinical as opposed to reactive depression,might be the difficulty for both the sufferer and the doctor to identify source or cause of the condition.Upon reflection,i may have developed reactive depression much earlier in 1985,but that is another story.that i may or may not explore somewhere else on another occasion.

I certainly had a second episode of clinical depression in about 2004/5,and then in 2010 it was diagnosed as a moderately severe,chronic condition for me.I consider the words,the language of diagnosis are reflective of medical opinion rather than as experienced.hard though the admission is,i consider it sometimes to be an absolutely awful experience,although i would not want to pretend for myself that it compares in seriousness either with other people or with other conditions.After all it is not a competition.

Now,i want to write mostly,a little about the last episode and my current experience.

From 2002 until 2010 i took daily amounts of an anti-depressant.I admit that i was quite shocked in late 2010 to find myself buried deep in another episode,partly because i had taken what seemed to be a highly successful anti-depressant which more or less worked all that time,and because the depth of the experience that began in the autumn of 2010 was in some respects the deepest and most damaging and painful for me.

I do not intend at this point to tell the whole story at this point.Suffice to say that on Thursday 16/12/2010 i hit a crisis,which for me even several years on was a powerful and frightening experience.

I got into work as usual that day,and felt like things started going wrong immediately.A call from a friend-colleague with an enquiry about a glitch in a report,which she wanted to check before she rectified it.I also catch something wrong in the tone of my voice.I put the phone down and my colleague i shared the office with that day asked whether i had been talking to a therapist!This i take as another ominous sign.Another conversation with one of IT support staff being her to contact my manager to tell him of the problem with the computer programme which prevents me completing an overdue assessment-i can hear the hysterical tone in my own voice and feel my anxiety that i could now lose my job.I know it is getting worse.

Then my interviewee arrives and i begin our interview:A serving soldier who has pleaded guilty to an assault,but who wants to be able to return to Afghanistan to continue bomb dispoal in due course- ajob in which he rsisks his life every time he is sent as part of  team to deal with and IED(improvised explosive device).I have the smell of death in the  room.We have anumber fo difficult discussions.Although i have peace and socialist oriented politics,individual soldiers in this context-both professionally and personally are not the enemy,and i have some sympathy and respect for his position).At the end of our interview i follow professional portocals and then between other intervews during the day,i draft my report neogotiating my way through the labyrinth of issues i need to consider.This is more difficult than usual not for profesional reasons but because it has taken its tooll on me persanly and taken  me to the edge of myself.I am haunted by sonciderayions of death.I cannot stop cryin.This must have taken its toll on my colleague,although i am eternally grateful for her support that day.Five or six hours later i am still there-i am still between tears and the dark edge of something else.At about 7pm i leave when i simply know that soon i will not be able to function at all.I struggle with myself on the journey home,and when i reach home.If i was not in obvious tears then i was crying inside,however trite that sounds and i continued to feel like i’m falling apart.

Next day,i happened to have a doctors appointment about something else entirely-slippage means i had made an appointment about something that had now past,Though i felt so bad i kept the appointment anyway,where i burst into tears again and fell apart.The diagnosis began although i still refused to be “signed off” from work.On the Monday,after a weekend in semi-constant tears during which i continued to feel i was disintegrating,whilst bizarrely also self observing,watching as if independent and separate from myself,i telephoned my doctor and virtually surrendered that continuing to go to work was impossible and called in sick.

i never returned,and leaving a major part of the story out for now,eventually obtained early medical retirement.

I guess if i did not actually come out of that episode of depression,which i prefer to refer to as melancholy,then i have mostly learned to manage it.That includes living without anti-depressants- as i would rather manage even my extreme sadness than be marginally less sad whilst feeling “zonked” and even more disconnected from whatever constitutes reality.

I have learnt some new survival and self management techniques although they are not always successful and do not always keep me from usually shorter but sometimes equally profound “bouts”of depression.Sometimes that actually comes out of strong and positive experiences.That too is another story.

As i write today,i am in one of those dark periods and places.having surrendered that i cannot do what i had originally planned today due to both physical and mental discomfort,i decided to write as both the best use of the time,rather than waste it,although it too is also hard.It is also therapeutic although i tend not to write cathartically or thinking therapeutically.I write mostly thinking that the side-effect might be therapeutic,hoping that i successfully communicate.Thirdly,like my young,courageous friend Tom,and others,i believe in talking and writing about it,like  him-because it is important that these issues ARE talked about,and particularly that men should do so…….

It felt like i spent a large part of 16/12/10 in tears.I have cried virtually every day since at some point during the day.I have grown used to this and have learned as part of my self-management to try to treat it as a gift.Some days its is worse than others.

For me,the symptoms of the melancholy can often be very banal-like living in a grey dust wasteland in which any action or activity is doubtful if not impossible.Whilst rarely if ever suicidal there can come times when i am simply indifferent to the future or the consequences of of a particular thought or action.I sometimes experience a self destructive desire to withdraw from things,projects,campaigns,events i am involved in>Sometime my self confidence or various aspects of it will desert me,although i was always shy.self doubt haunts me,like the dust/dark grey eminence,the personification of the melancholy that accompanies me:the empty,grey monks habit not unlike the nazghul/ringwraiths of Lord of the Rings..

Today,this week and much of last week was like this too.

Just as Tom in his openness about his own condition has assisted me,so has my friend Laurel in her insights,observations and indeed her support to me.She talked amongst other things about procrastination-and whilst i don’t especially regard this as a feature of myself i now acknowledge that this explains at least in part both some of my own  inertia,and pinpoints some of those occasions when i now understand that both not allowing myself to go out to some events and the consequences of such a decision are equally problematic and reinforce or feed feelings of disempowerment.

I have had a variety of these symptoms and effects today.I woke too late to be at a local leafletting event.Hauling myself out of bed,i felt so”under the weather”i never made it to a 2nd campaigning event of the day.I felt a certain amount of relief,but the still have to manage my regret and my continuing discomfort.my loneliness increases because i miss my friends and comrades.i hav eregret at “letting others down”even if rationally,that is not the case.I still have the feelings of my 17 year olf selfin my head,that i jahve mised something.Writing about it does not ease it….

I mulled over what i would write throughout the day.What has come out is not quite as envisaged.The turning point,which brought me to actually write was what happened when i turned on the news:

The 1st item up was news of the presentation in court of a man charged with the strangulation of his 11 year old daughter.I went straight to tears,and tears perhaps more than usual.i do not assume he is guilty,i do not condemn or judge-it is not my place,and whilst i am no kind of saint,i like to think it is not in my nature.

I cannot continue to do social work as a full or even part time job-for what use to someone in potentially greater distress can be a man who has tears in his eyes or burst into tears.Yet in a sense whilst i can remove me from the social work in another sense they cannot they cannot take the social worker out of me.So that makes moments like this harder.The gift of its is that i still feel”pain with the world”and compassion for people within it.On the other hand,when employed i was aware that i was part of a wide community of people drawn together and connected by a caring and a desire to do what they can  in such situations which people.That is no longer the case for me.Whilst this and many other incidents demonstrate the pain of the human condition,which for me does NOT require a fixed veiwe of human nature,nor that it is inherently evil-its is much more difficult for me to play or see my part of in a network of care.what is”out here”is much more tenuous than a network of at least good intentions(i realise that this is idealist,but i am not making a materialist analytical point;it is a  description of personal and possibly shared psychology)

So i must bear it and bear with it,work it through,manage it and hope for better times…..

d1/06072013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Music-Afterlife”MIracle”

i like this,and yet it is painful.

If i actually listen to both the music and the words,even though i assume it to be a fiction,it takes me to a sad place.i guess it resonates with my experience,though i may not choose nor even know to be specific.

so why do we,or least i choose to revisit such places?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C-837M3zGY

Working People are Amazing!

There is a lot out there in the world to despair and to be depressed about.

I do NOT mean to make light of the personal or natural disasters and accidents that happen.These are however,events locked into the very meaning and nature of living.There is also the pain of our relationships with each other-we don’t all like each other,and its never likely to be the case that we all get along all of the time.At some level or other we have to come to terms with this reality,and beyond immediate need,we ought to be able to live in societies in which there are somehow or other”services”to ease the pain of this and to cope as best we can.

What makes,i think all of this so excruciatingly difficult and additionally painful which seems rationally to lead to depression or despair are the fault lines,the divisions in society that essentially seems to give one part of such division a disproportionate power and advantage,whilst dispossessing and de-valuing the rest of us.It seems to me that anything can be used as a basis of such division,and i remember during my training as a social worker taking part in a simulation game that illustrated and made the point-that i think was called something like community or star power.We also seem to live in an economically divided,class society which further compounds and exploits other and probably pre-existing divisions,like age,race,gender,(dis)ability.

That is broadly and briefly i understand the world.I look at the world again and see the juggernaut style impact of powers and institutions and those in power,set against those with much less,those almost without and the dispossessed.

Again despair and depression seem rational responses to that world.It seems hopeless.Yet,as a conversation with a friend earlier this afternoon reminded me,there are signs of hope,and we have to act and believe as if there is hope,or there is nothing.

Without meaning to be soft and romantic about it,i think love always lies behind that and at the root of hope.I do think St.Paul was right about the importance of faith,hope and charity(caritas=love)and that along with him,the greatest of these is love.

Love of what?Love of the world is contended and contentious.So for me it has to be humanity.I will not make exceptions to that notion except to say this:notions of evil are problematic,so i prefer to see the world this way-hoping(there is hope again)that we might all work together,but recognising that some have sought division and privelege-but that finally people will choose not simply what is popular,but what  is right within the context of the mass of humanity,or the human family.That word family is important-even if imprecise.Most of us experience famiky in some way or another and i would hope are realistic in the way we come to some kind of terms with it.At its best,it is not perfect,but we relate to it and to each other,we do the best we can with it and in our lives.That leads to considerations,i hope of friendship,solidarity,companionship,comradeship…and i would hope at least a notion that we should live and let live.

What fuels me too is that when it works,the material of our affiliations may seem gossamer like in a very material,alienated world-but actually it can be amazingly powerful and strong  in the world.

I have often heard expressions like that it is the poorest who are most generous,and i have seen and experienced this for myself.I also see an almost instinctive solidarity amongst my class,defined in terms of the relationship to the means of production,and underneath that combination of self deprecation and simple to failure to recognise who we are,i note the astonishing range of talent,energy,passion amongst my class.The other class talk a lot about genius,and special ability that then seems to attach to some notion of justified privelege.They talk a lot about themselves and insist on telling us.At the same time they are only interested in us as labour,or in order to demonise and blame us,or for the entertainment value of some sort of peculiar human interest stories.It seems to me that actually beyond the limits of our labour,which they fetishise,they don’t understand us at all.

Although we need to do exactly that-to understand ourselves and our class.As i hope we more fully begin to do so,then we might heal the divisions that ravage us,and in becoming fully self-conscious of ourselves as a class,and stand to our full stature,as human beings and indeed as the gravediggers of both the old,decadent,destructive capitalist society which seems to dominate us at present and to built in its place a commonwealth,a common treasury that we can share and live in together in our full humanity.

Then i believe we shall see that “Working People are Amazing!”

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Just a Thought about Ambition

Sometimes it used to cross my mind that perhaps i should be more ambitious.When i think about it hard,i decided i wanted to be a social worker,i thought about training as a priest,and i still do,and i wanted to be a writer.

I consider myself lucky that i decided quite young that i also wanted to live without regret,so often i’ve followed the interesting idea,the interesting possibility or project rather than the money or”career”and ambition.It has not always worked,in that following those dreams did not lead to a rainbow,but that has always been okay with me.i tried,i put my toe in the water.

I decided not to become “music organiser”with a friend,in a certain place,because i wanted to go to train to be a social worker,even though i had not even secured a place when i made that decision.I do not regret my choice.Starting my own organisation in 1970 with a group of friends,and starting more formally as a volunteer and a youth worker,i went onto train from 1973,and retiring in 2011,meant something just over a 40 year career in social work and related activities.Though i often did other things in parallel,and sometimes made efforts to leave social work or change directions,i never drifted far.It always drew me back,not simply for economic reasons and at the end of that time,i have few regrets either about my choice or about missing other opportunities.

I do admit that there were moments,when seeing friends and colleagues move up the ladder or seek and get promotion,i would wonder if my apparent lack of ambition meant there was something wrong with me,but no i think not.i was happy to be a “footsoldier”.i trained to be  a social worker because i wanted to be…..a social worker.i wanted to work with people and if possible to help them,in their distress and difficulty,not because i thought myself special or saintly or anything else but i think because i felt a responsibility to live out my values in a way that did not mean i would have to impose them on anyone.i also felt that whilst we had experienced problems,and whilst never well off,i had a better life than some i saw around me,and wanted in some ways to pass that on.It pained me that i saw the world was unfair,and i would not,and still don’t accept that i/we should simply come to terms with that so-called reality.It also pianed me that as a child i saw distress and could not do anything about it.i felt i had to do something,and that something was better than nothing.As i became a revolutionary i also felt i could not set these thoughts aside and “build for”and essentially wait for the revolution.i have no regrets about that either.It has never meant that i am content with reform,but that reform is neccessary on the road to revolution,and that once reform is begun,i would carry on down the road,and hopefully hurry on down the road to revolution.

Today then,i think i’m lucky to have few regrets so far.I can  count three-the loss of friendships.My shyness,which contributed to losing and sometimes not making friends.Last but not least that”1968 is not finished yet”and that we have not already made revolution.i like others,like to think we are still working on that one.

I hope in my career,and from my values as a gnostic christian and a revolutionary socialist that i continue to be of help,of use to someone or more than someone.One of the things that has struck me though is that i feel i have always gained more from my”clients”than they ever gained from me.My first professional supervisor,a friend and comrade too,shockingly described social work to me as”emotional prostitution”in that we were needy of the involvement in other peoples emotions and human feelings.That has always been a valuable warning and insight to me,and it puts my self delusions in context.

Life is strange,in many ways.One is that whilst i was on long term sick,whilst it was not therapy,i found it therapeutic to write on the internet.It kept me in touch with friends and comrades,and indeed renewed and extended friendships and comradeship.It also enabled me to write.I don’t claim i write well but i hope i communicate and i do get to write.Apart from being avresh realisation of anonther ambition,what do i mostly write about?It might be at one level about politics or music or thought but mostly it continues to be a concern about pain,human distress and people,real people-flesh and blood and bone and feelings and passion and creativity,ingenuity and talent and human power.That continues

Since i have retired,i have headed straight towards campaigning and political activity with human beings,usually in distress of one kind or another at its centre.I can’t help myself.I suppose at some level i could have a quiet,comfortable life but at least for now whilst i might be in decline,i am still alive and with enough strength to keep on heading towards the edge of something.If life looks too quiet i seem unavoidably to head towards the trouble.

I find myself wanting to be involved in defending and improving the best elements of the welfare state but within a better context.In the process of struggle for that,i would to find ways to defend the best of what”is”along with developing new ways to meet the burgeoning distress i don’t just read about but see around me.i don’t however wish to return to being a social worker,nor even any kind of alternative-social worker.That said we are all full of paradoxes and contradictions.If that if not part of”human nature”,which whilst slow to change,i don’t think is fixed.So perhaps my thoughts and actions don’t entirely match here-though i hope that is not hypocrisy.

I regard most things in life,including me as”a work in progress”,so conclusions are difficult.But at this point,i’m coming to the working conclusion that whilst they can take the social work away from me,even i can’t take the social worker out of me.After all,i suppose 40+ years doing it,living it,thinking it,feeling it…is  a long time to be in harness.

This last weekend i am aware that i have at the very least talked with,spent time with,even advised others.I am clear that i am primarily their friend and usually their comrade too,but i have also to admit that what i think,what i say and sometime show i say it,remains influenced by the store of knowledge,which even if i forget most of it,still leaves its mark at least on me,and has come to me a particular way of social sciences that are at the root of social work and filtered through personal and social values rooted equally in a spiritual path and revolutionary,libertarian socialism.

All of that is still meaningful in relating to other human beings in a way in which i want to do more than “scream that something is badly wrong”,to change the way we live now,so that we might realise the world we have to win.In the here and now we should live and let live.Beyond that i would like to continue to work for the world as a common treasury for us allto share.After that i hope that i might be able to”go home”.

i will end for now with one reference and a kind of an aside.After years of desiring to write,i realised the peculiar reference of that warning to be”careful what you wish for”.Applying it in a slightly odd way,it does seem to apply to me.After years of only writing the flimsiest of material-captions to articles or pictures,links,a few lines of text-alongside a set of articulated reasons why i could not settle down to write more substantively,which is reducible to lack of confidence,and lack of time, i realised that actually what was left of my career came down to writing,in that i was writing up to four reports a day for a number of years to assist in sentencing in criminal courts.Freed of those constraints i do now just continue to write,but will say nothing more.

What set me wondering about some of this piece was discovering a fragment of music,and the musician behind it,that once found crashed into my thinking like the ejected pilot on a parachute crashing through the roof of a greenhouse.When i heard this,i rediscovered and ambition…to meet the musician,promote a gig where i hope she might play this brief solo just or me,and to return to music promotion once again.This is Tal Wilkenfeld.To misquote Keef Hartley”Is anyone listening?Then i will carry on!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-J_sJB29Q 

 

 

thatWhat i am