Travelling

I've been travelling.
It's a sign when the normal becomes abnormal, when the ordinary extraordinary, when the mundane transforms itself into the inexplicable and the commonplace becomes a rare and truly ugly thing.
I'm being judgemental.
In an airport I suddenly realised something:
They do REALLY live in a dream.

I find myself listening to conversations, tuning in to other people's lives, eavesdropping on their reality and peeping through the curtains to their minds.
Cheeky, rude and intrusive I guess.
Irresistible though.
Enlightening.
No-one I eavesdropped on showed the slightest sign that anything was wrong......
Not with me (I was unobtrusive, and I shower enough)

With what they were living through.

With how weird, oppressive and controlling things had become.
Their grandparents would have had something to say about that back in the 40's and 50's.
And yet if they still live even they have forgotten how to be free, have been distracted by the slow creeping-in of the sickness, say nothing.
They can't quite see it.
Cannot shape the words, form the ideas.

But they feel something deep down, they know something is amiss.

It shouldn't be like this.
Deep down they know.
For some reason they just can't seem to get hold of it.
The reason, of course, is that it's everywhere.
It's very complicated.
And everything is wrong.

These form the critical evidences of the existence of a pervasive controlling of the thoughts, the communities, the families, the loyalties, the pockets and the fears of the herd.
They don't know that anything is wrong!

So many people, heads down, sitting next to strangers and communicating only with their electric friends.
No shaking of hands, no "Glad to meet you", no eye contact, no searching for points of common experience, no "this one's on me, pal" nor even a "Piss off mate".
Empty vessels, travelling in a cocoon of self, avoiding the potentiality for difficulty.

There used to be in the past strong connections between people that outweighed almost any other consideration. Bonds of love and the idea of one mate for life. Bonds of family and the strength of proximity of kin: Dad's round the corner, Nan lives at the bottom of the street.
Bonds of community and the understanding of who was who, where to go and maybe not go, who the families were and what they'd done over time.
Bonds at work, knowing your job, getting on with or disliking your colleagues or the boss but being a part of something over time, maybe a whole career.
Unions.
Tribes.

The very idea of acting in unison as a people to right a wrong, flowering only momentarily in history, is gone.
Few students ever object. No rallies. No sit-ins.

Students have had twenty years of television.

Twenty years that have seen the ripping apart of entire communities, many stretching back for hundreds of years. The closure of large industrial works and mines and the export of that production to places in the world where people are grateful, people do as they're told, where people will accept.
Country folk to the cities, rich folks in the village houses and pubs at the weekend.

The fundamental structure of human community has been gradually and piece by piece de-constucted before our very eyes.

No one quite knows where they stand.
Their neighbours remain strangers for years.
Their love for another is impermanent and requires no absolutes.
No commitment cannot be broken , other than debt perhaps.
People have been gradually engineered to become disconnected with other, real human beings.
The smoking bans in bars and at work are just one tiny element of this process.
Healthy for the body, damaging in many other ways.
Divisive.
The expansion of the EU to allow mass migration from poorer eastern European countries. The laxity of border controls in the U.S.
Asylum laws.
New peoples to deal with, strange habits, odd languages. Unsettling to many.
Deliberately and predictably so.

The increase in "bad news" reporting means that every home can be invaded, every man fear a street brawl or a mugging, every woman fear a rape, every parent fear a paedophile, every tax dodger or licence fee avoider fear a knock at the door.

Know your marriage won't last forever. Know your job won't last for long. Know your roof belongs to a bank. Know your community will change. Know your kid's will probably take drugs, move elsewhere, become Christmas visitors.
Know someone close will die of cancer.
Know you're being filmed.
Pay the debts.
Watch the telly.
Play with your mindless toys.

Lose yourself in otherworld, in dreamland. You don't have time to care, you don't have the strength to do anything but keep your head down, keep your nose to the grindstone, pray uselessly that you won't get cancer, try not to think hard about anything.

And have no-one to talk about it with anyway.

Watch the big game. Watch the docu-soap. Watch big brother.
Eat shit and poisoned food.
Drink doctored water.
Breath polluted air in an atmosphere bombarded with microwaves.

Dream of a lottery win whilst across the world the dead babies of the Blair-Bush wars rot in their unmarked graves, their kin dreaming of a bloody and just revenge.

Believe the big lies.
Believe what you see on the news even when it is unutterably nonsensical.
Learn to feel nothing when you see a crowd bombed, a market full of bloodied corpses, a starving child nuzzling at the breast of her dead mother, the shock and awe firework show, dumbing the senses, inuring the outer mind to the sickest evil, bringing it into each home and planting itself on the hearth, sitting like a rabid dog in the centre of their minds.
Preoccupying them.
Making them scared.

Excuse me but....
These f******g Zombies wouldn't say boo to a goose.
They just don't know how f*****d over they are getting.
They may very well be lost.

They are certainly not human in any meaningful way.
Their souls are being forced further and further into the enveloping cocoon of this unreality.
War is peace.
Control is safety.
Fear is good.
Everything is too complicated.
There is nothing they can do about anything.

There is just "I".

And someone is always watching, but the bad things keep happening.

I hugged as many of them as I could, but it wasn't enough.
It's good to be home.