What do you think will be taught about Covid-19 in 100 years from now? [Written to a question on Quora 4/4/20]

We will be reminding our new generations how many people died who need not have died, had they just stood still sooner.

We will be telling tales of the damage caused by people buying authority in excess of their wisdom and selling lies rather than admit their wisdom is not absolute and universal.

Covid-19, as a globally unfolding event, is being recorded in unprecedented detail and in real-time. We will have crunched the numbers long before a hundred years have passed and will know exactly the cost of recklessness.

There will be so much data and so many records from all over the world that nobody will be able to pretend their part in what happened when it gets picked over in legal detail later.

-

When Covid-19 first raised its head in China it is not a surprise it was a few days before they knew quite how dangerous it was, nor that they hoped it would turn out to be a local incident unworthy of global note. The important thing is what they did as soon as they realised their hopes would be dashed.

The Chinese government warned the wider world, put all non-essential activity at home on pause and told everybody there to stand still. Then they threw all the resources of China into saving lives.

The Chinese didn’t pretend to the world it should expect a few people to get the sniffles soon. The Chinese were not being boastful when they showed the world they could build a specialist hospital in a handful of days, they were demonstrating the urgency they saw to build a specialist hospital.

The Chinese people were not being oppressed by an authoritarian regime when they were held in their homes and individuals were being walked immediately into quarantine at the first symptom of trouble, they were being kept safe by one.

-

When Covid-19 first raised its head in Europe there were no illusions in government about what had happened in China or doubts about what needed to be done but the political system differed in Europe. Hence it was necessary to pass emergency laws to centralise all costs to government that would arise from putting all non-essential activity on pause and from telling everybody to stand still before the button was pressed and the order issued.

Guidance was given to socially-distance and to voluntarily take precautions while systems were devised and paperwork was drawn up as completely as urgency allowed for no individual, when all this is over, to reasonably complain at their own eventual financial loss or at someone else’s eventual gain arising directly from the normal activity of the country being placed on hold by law.

But as soon as the mechanism was in place to centralise a country’s Covid-19 costs to one national account, thereby giving nobody a valid reason for kicking-off about having to stay home and watch telly instead of risking death on crowded streets, all non-essential activity was put on pause and everybody was told to stay home.

Meanwhile all available health resources were being put toward keeping people alive wherever the virus had already reached.

European people were not being oppressed by suddenly authoritarian governments when they stayed home, they were trying to stay safe and to ease the burden on the people saving lives. Their police were active to make sure everyone did their equal bit and didn’t take avoidable risks.

-

When Covid-19 first raised its head in America the President called it a hoax. He shrugged it off as a political attack on his person. If the coronavirus came up in interview he talked it down and spoke of his own greatness.

Days passed. China and Europe continued to demonstrate how to contain a virus through lock-down and Europe was demonstrating how delaying lock-down even just for the legal process to enable it fairly in a democracy carried a cost in lives.

The President spoke of his greatness and the greatness of his followers while, as a child might, name-calling any who doubted his wisdom was absolute.

The scientists in America began to shout, the people in America who were paying attention to the scientists began to shout, too, the President spoke calmly of miracles and pinned his hope to Easter as a day to celebrate his anti-viral victory in churches all across his land.

Then hospitals began to shout and his celebration was postponed

-

It seems the global memo to pass supportive legislation to take the financial burden off individuals had reached the US Congress and Senate because, albeit reluctantly, it was done.

But the bit about hitting the pause button and locking the whole country down as soon as you physically can so the virus can be stopped from spreading and killing people seems to have been mislaid. [*]

Time passed. Time during which the scientists’ screams became so loud the President could hardly hear even his own voice praising his greatness on his cable TV.

-

We cannot trust the President to ever tell us truthfully what made him lose faith in his pastors’ adoring assurances - I can think of nowhere else from which a businessman of long-established low repute would draw expectation of miracles by Easter. Clearly he turned to science only after superstition had let him down.

He then lent doctors his stage from which they soon said things he did not want to have heard. Scientific facts became the celebrity draw and the President tried hard to look important as he introduced experts to deliver wisdom that he could not comprehend.

-

The man who believed he knew everything, who was intoxicated by the authority of his purchased puppet-rank to the extent of hallucinating his own divinity, the man who led prayer for himself before government business, the man whom wealthy pastors queued eagerly to touch, was being smacked in the face, repeatedly and with increasing force, by a world more real than any he had ever known.

The man who quite literally painted his public image to match the one in his mirror at home, compensating with make-up in the glare of broadcast news that the light that bathed him for the public record was not first softened and warmed by reflection off his gold, had fear in his uncovered eyes.

He stared right and he stared left and he stared straight ahead of him in shock. Then he looked down and saw there was blood on his hands. For in them lay the responsibility he so vehemently denies.

-

-

The rest is not yet even recent history. But unnecessary carnage will continue over in the US while people argue for the sake of it whether anyone has a constitutional right to tell an American to stand still, even if standing still is the only possible way to stop the virus spreading and killing more Americans.

-

At the time of posting this answer the Johns Hopkins statistics page is reporting just over 266,000 US confirmed Covid-19 cases, and 6921 deaths. Individual American States and cities are shutting themselves down to varying degrees to protect themselves but it seems they are waiting for proof they have a problem locally in order to justify imposing any restrictions at all.
Being yet without a countrywide lock-down and without a coordinated response to focus existing resource upon immediate need and to urgently create resource for future need, we will be teaching the US’s story as a cautionary tale of how bad a disaster can become if rules are not made to bend to meet reality as it changes.

-

People have died because of their blind faith in the irrefutable wisdom of priests in biblical scripture for thousands of years. Now we are seeing Americans of all religions and none being killed by those with blind faith in the irrefutable wisdom of the handful of politicians who wrote their constitution, semantics again being held more sacred than human life itself.

America is currently responding to a pandemic exactly as it would have done in the 18th century, with momentary shrugs, days of prayer, weeks of hopeful denial, then an extended period of chaos and catastrophic loss of life.

 [*Closing the international doors to America just trapped the virus somewhere it had 350,000,000 people to infect. That doesn’t count as a lock-down.]

Scratching your back with an assault rifle

Turning to the Christian bible for comfort is like scratching your back with an assault rifle. If you hold it just right you might be able to reach your itch but that's not what it was designed for. It remains a weapon of war.

-

If a person requires regular or frequent consultation with their pastor they should find another one. Jesus got his point across to uneducated people in minutes without a handbook to refer to. If your pastor can't do that they obviously don't have a clue as to what Jesus was on about.

Anyone who points a person to Paul or John, the self-proclaimed apostle and the self-proclaimed prophet in the New Testament, for insight into anything other than Paul's or John's own imagination and character is misdirecting them, whether knowingly so or not.

 -

Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, and the later John, the writer of Revelation, were self-aggrandising 1st century fantasists who sought elevated status for themselves within a cult of worship and who made careers out of dispensing false wisdom, in each case off the back of claiming a "vision" of a dead man in order to hijack his reputation and spuriously claim divine authority. Neither Paul nor John ever met, saw or heard the human Jesus.

-

Unless a person were predisposed to believe it, nothing in Paul's or John's output would be taken seriously. Imagine if today a bloke walked into a pub and said he had had a "vision" of a dead guy so now everyone should brown-nose the government and suffer in silence for the rest of their lives so everything would be great when they die.

Imagine if someone else came in another night claiming to have had a more recent vision of the same dead bloke and started raving about beasts and afterlives and torment and the world coming to an end when the dead bloke came back.

It is no great surprise that church-based Christianity only really took off when the emperor Constantine enforced his own militarily backed version of it.

-

According to the gospels, not long before Jesus died he gathered his chums and told them he knew his number was going to be up soon. He reassured them he had said everything there was to say, that his message really was that simple, and he warned them that after he had died there would inevitably be the odd person appearing out of the woodwork and trying to complicate things in his name but no one should be fooled.

Understandably, perhaps, for such superstitious times, Jesus' pals needed further convincing that he would be gone for good so he comes up with the surest and most reliable thing he can think of and tells them that if the sun still comes up, if the world is still turning, anyone claiming to have seen him or claiming he said anything but that which they themselves had already heard him say would be lying. End of.

In a masterpiece of self-serving spin, John the prophet reimagined this insistence by Jesus that he would be just as dead as anyone else and would never ever be back into a "second coming" for everyone to wait for, one that would bring about the end of the world. It was obviously a lot easier to make stuff like that up while no one had the gospels to hand in which they could read the reports of what Jesus had actually said.

-

At this point you can either believe Jesus or you can believe Paul and John. You can't believe both. Of course, if you don't believe Jesus then you can't really believe Paul and John either, because if Jesus was telling fibs at any time he can't possibly be the supernaturally perfect being Paul and John insist he was to justify anyone taking any notice whatsoever of what they say.

Thus it is that both logic and biology have it that the chap who said he would be staying dead after his execution was telling the truth and the two chaps who said he had appeared to them after he had died were fibbing for their own purposes.

-

If you read the New Testament as you would a regular book, by the time you have read the four gospels one after the other you know that all the books that follow can be dismissed. Not only will you have just read four accounts of Jesus having told his disciples he hadn't forgotten to mention anything, you will also have identified the character of Jesus the person, will have seen through the fantasy elements and will probably have recognised what it was the Romans' started their official church to hide.

The Roman Christianity rolled out by Constantine was designed specifically to prevent people noticing that the "God" of which Jesus spoke, the Jewish one who had inspired all the key biblical characters from Abraham to Jesus to defy the status quo, the God that had given them the courage to do whatever it is they are remembered for was their conscience.

 -

The key to understanding the Old Testament and the gospels, the Jewish story, is to look not at whatever standout action it was the biblical heroes took but instead to notice that immediately beforehand they each went off alone into the wilderness, up mountains or for a stroll in the garden, anywhere they were free from human distraction. There they stayed for as long as it took them to be certain that they knew in their own heart that they should do whatever it was they were considering, regardless of what anyone else on earth might think, say or do.

So, unlike regular pastors, I always and only advise a person to do the same thing, to find as natural a spot as is convenient for some uninfluenced private thought and to look to their own conscience for "God's" guidance. You won't find it anywhere else.

To make it easier for folk to know what to feel for I use the secular analogy of us each having our own bear inside us. It can't tell us what to do but it can growl if we are going wrong. If your bear is chilled just get on and enjoy being yourself. If your bear is growling work out what you personally are doing or not doing that is making it growl and change your ways.

Any advisor who directs a person seeking personal guidance to focus their thoughts upon the detail of what anyone else was inspired by their God / conscience to do in their own particular circumstance, especially if it happened in a distant land somewhen in the blur of ancient history, is simply distracting from their own ignorance to pretend a superior wisdom.

In combination with using selective quotation from a collection of wildly different and frequently conflicting books conveniently bound together as if they are one contiguous work to confuse a person, to feed their self-doubt and so foster a perpetual reliance upon their advisor, I think the modern word for the practice is gaslighting.

______

The word "faith" is an interesting one. Faith on its own doesn't really exist. You need to "have faith in" something.

It is hypocritical to say you have faith in God if you go to any third party (person / book / etc.) for God's advice. Whether you call it God, your conscience, a bear or anything else, you already have a 24/7 direct line to your internal counsel. Trust it. You will find that if you just avoid lying, cheating, stealing or doing harm your conscience will be clear / your God will be happy and you can stop worrying what other people think or thought and can get on with being your peaceful happy self.

No one has ever been you before.

There is no book of instructions. [Po]

Pastor Po's Midwinter Message to America

Imagine for a moment how sick it would seem if African-Americans and others still striving for equal rights in the USA wore nooses fashioned in precious metal on fine chains around their necks and decorated their meeting places with gruesome sculptures of the lynchings of their forebears.

It is no less sick that as "Christians" so many desperate and oppressed people still badge themselves with and kneel before crosses representing those upon which thousands of rebels were killed and left on public display to dissuade others from contemplating revolt against Roman authority and against the enslavement of native populations across their ancient Empire.

______

The Romans proudly documented that their wealth was the spoils of war, that their home economy was reliant on slavery, and that the physical magnificence of their cities was hewn from rock by people who had no choice. Even today, for twelve euros a tourist head, you can still visit the Colosseum built by tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners of war after the failed tax revolt that saw them driven out of Jerusalem.

It is no surprise to the educated outside observer that in the USA, where the 21st century population is still encouraged to look to the rulebook of the Romans' church for guidance, the average employee is struggling to get by while their employers live in relative luxury, a citizen's health is directly related to their wealth, and the highest office in the land was bought by a man with no relevant experience and no respect for humanity, truth or the law.

Neither is it a surprise to find in a Europe that has properly embraced secular democracy and where, outside of Rome and the Vatican, churches no longer hold sway over public opinion, that universal healthcare is the norm, that employees have protected rights, and that populations protest and readily hold their elected leaders to account when their actions do not serve the majority.

______

If you believe the self-appointed apostle Paul's letters of instruction echo even remotely the words of the man who so famously died for telling people to trust the god in their conscience to guide them you are a fool.

Quite simply, no 1st century Jew expecting a messiah to lead them to freedom at any moment would ever have been tempted away from their temple by someone preaching that their god intended them to be contented to live and to die as slaves to Rome.

______

Had slaves kidnapped from Africa been brought to any land where Jesus was in charge they would have been released immediately, fed properly, had any ailments or injuries sorted out straight away and been free to live as equals in that land if they chose to, or they would have been helped to return home as comfortably as Jesus himself would have been carried on the same journey.

Sadly the lands to which they were taken were those where Paul’s instruction held sway and they were fucked. 

______

In today's America you have the choice, according to your Constitution, to either 

a) Follow the human Jesus' example and let your conscience guide you to stand up, speak out and to vote to improve the lives of all your fellow citizens, regardless of race, gender or consensual sexual preference, because all are equal before god or 

b) Follow Paul's instructions, many of which were written as part of his deal with the Romans to save his own life when he was arrested for promoting equality, to do exactly the opposite and to suffer gratefully as if a perfect Roman slave, accepting abuse of yourself and of your peers as if your god intended you to be an underclass.

Team Jesus has no need of clubhouses, no need of books of instruction, there's nothing to worship, no hierarchy of officers, no fees to pay and no badges to wear. Every member is equal to every other and trusts their own conscience to guide them.

Team Paul is the multiplicity of rival Christian worship-clubs whose officers make a good living from teaching anyone daft enough to believe Jesus was magic that they, as mere mortals, are powerless to improve their lot in this life and will burn in hell for eternity if they so much as try. These are the worship-clubs whose members have prayed uselessly before Roman crosses for 1700 years and who adorn their clubhouses with often graphic representations of Jesus' execution to dissuade their members from following his example. 

______

I can think of no groups other than Team Paul Christians whose members are twisted enough to celebrate a man's birth in buildings so clearly dedicated to the celebration of his death. 

Come to think of it, I can think of no one but Team Paul Christians who endure a life of poverty because hypocrites who live in palaces tell them to.

It is to these Team Paul Christians I would like to point out that their god existed long before their Roman church and long before the Jewish temple that preceded it, and it will exist long after, too. The god in their bible has always been the conscience inside each of us and the organisers of religion have always dedicated themselves to distracting people from it. 

______

Happiness is for life, not just for Christmas.

Trees

At the end of World War II in 1945 Oak Road, where I would later be born and would grow up, did not exist. A decade later would see it did exist, that my father had bought the indicated plot along it, and that he had designed and was in the process of building there what would become our family home, a safe distance from the pea-soup fogs that he had grown up with and that still persisted twenty miles away in London.

Without warranting photography in the area in the meanwhile, this next image is from the late 1990s and shows the houses along the road at their original as-built sizes. Though already forty to fifty years old, these substantial four and five bed homes were still deemed generous family accommodation in what was by then firmly established as the Stockbroker Belt.

Across the 2000s, hastened by the establishment in the village of Chelsea Football Club's training ground and the associated influx of the super-rich, predatory developers began out-bidding anyone who might like to live in a house as it stood. Character homes with space in their gardens were being bought up and routinely doubled in size, many addresses returning to market with their price tag doubled or more and thus permanently changing the demographic of the area.

By 2010, our family house that had sat comfortably among its neighbours for almost half a century had become dwarfed by them and we were surrounded by people with attitudes very different from our own, necessarily so to have achieved the wherewithal to buy the bloated residences the developers created.

Don't imagine I was jealous of the new neighbours' houses, nor of their lives, though I did become irritated when our lack of liquid cash and our tendency not to waste what we had drew disapproving glances from them at our scruffy cars and weathered, once-white Critall windows. After all, we were no less conveniently located than them, didn't have so far to walk from room to room as they did, and, most important of all, we had trees.

All the trees that were on my father's building plot before he built our house still stood in its garden when he had need of houses no more and it came to us to sell. A few huge oaks, sixty years bigger than when he first saw them, were surrounded by their offsprung generations and interspersed with beech and birch, sweet chestnut and holly, and myriad others the names of which I never knew. If nature brought its seed, there it grew. And there I grew, too.

Thus it was only the changes to neighbouring properties, not to our own, that saw the value of my father's plot having risen come his death to more than we could afford to pay to keep it in our family.

Yet, saddest for me was not that our house would be lost to us come its sale, nor even that it would be demolished and no trace remain of it.

My upset was that the trees would go, that every next child to grow up where I had been born would be poorer than I had been, never mind how much money their parents had.

______

[Images are from Google Earth except for the overlay of the new house which came from Wego as GE have not updated yet.  An image exists on GE of the plot taken after the developers had demolished our house, cleared the plot of trees and not yet begun the replacement build but it is of poor quality and looks especially sad.]

Evolution Explained (in 403 words)

No creature is an exact copy of its parent. Any part of it might be slightly bigger or smaller or differently shaped. As the creature breeds it passes traits on to its offspring. As various traits combine they become exaggerated, such as two tall parents having taller children and two smaller parents having smaller children.

If all the most nutritious food in a supermarket was moved to the highest shelf and the shelves were impossible to climb it would be the tallest children in the next generation who would be the best fed, those with the tallest parents.

If the lower shelves were emptied and the unit toppled over scattering the little remaining nutritious food onto the floor it would be the smallest who would be most satisfied, their needs being the least, and only the most flexible of the tall would eat at all.

If the supermarket were to run out completely it would be those with the stamina to reach the next and the speed to get there before the crowds who would eat.

It can be misleading to say a creature evolved to have a long neck to eat the highest fruit to survive. This wrongly implies a purposeful advance.

It is clearer to say that of the range of neck lengths that had existed it was the shorter ones that died out because they could no longer reach the fruit. Which is just a natural filtering out of the least efficient when times get tough.

It will generally have been a significant environmental change causing a scarcity of food that will have brought about the natural extinction of any one version of a species if it cannot compete with any other version or species sharing the food resource.

Mankind has also brought about the extinction of many species though its own action and through the accidental or intentional contamination of separate balanced ecosystems with species or diseases from elsewhere.

The deepest areas of the ocean are the places where changes to the climate on the surface of our planet has had least effect and where the environment still supports creatures that have remained successful in very early versions.

On the surface of the earth the swamp seems to have been the most consistent environment, always existing somewhere as the perfect home for crocodiles and alligators, they being among the oldest versions of any creatures we can see easily today.

28/12/14 [A snapshot]

I visited Guildford again, it was unpleasantly cold there, in a wintry way not an unwelcoming one.

The Shops are more fun today, I thought, as a I chanced upon a gentleman with a stand filled with booklets next to him. The printed cardboard sign above his stand bore the legend "What You Should Know About Mental Disorders" and a logo, the initials of the Jehovah's Witnesses dot org.

I was not rude, I was not loud, I don't think I drew a crowd as I questioned him on the appropriateness of using the emotive and very serious subject of mental health as a hook to attract attention to his worship club flyers. He was stumped but started to move the booklets that mentioned the subject on their covers to the top of the stand, nearest to the sign, and the ones that did not he moved down.

We spoke for some minutes. I was cheerfully nimble-minded and more learned than he expected. Eventually, when standing still in the cold had become tiresome for me, he could come up with no answer at all when asked the straight question, "What benefit is it to me or anyone else to be a member of your club?" and he was equally at a loss when then asked, "What ill will befall me or misfortune will I suffer if I don't join?".

With no apparent upside to membership and no downside to non-membership he appeared momentarily baffled as to why he was a member of the club himself, though I should commend him for conceding positively that the JWs are not an appropriate organisation to advise on any aspect of mental health.

I left the idiot pondering my assertion that every time he and those like him said to do something benign or worthwhile just because a particular book said so he and those like him were giving authority to anyone else's instruction to other people to do harmful things just because the same particular book said do them, too.

I tried on some shoes but they were too small and no larger the same were in stock at that or any other branch or their warehouse. I ate a sausage sandwich perhaps eight feet to the side from an ex-colleague from two jobs ago to whom I would have had nothing to say beyond acknowledging that we had been colleagues so said nothing.

I despise in passing the individual or committee that decided to put HP Sauce in small sachets which are impossible to open without getting some sauce on your fingers and those who dare distribute as napkins the flimsiest of paper sheets that adhere, tear and leave themselves attached to drying sauce instead of wiping one's digits clean. More wandering about ensued. I needed a cigarette.

I warmed up by queuing in Costa, before sitting outside in the cold to consume hot milk with coffee in it, to smoke and to watch the herds of pedestrians I had numbered amongst only moments earlier. As a seated observer of the hustle and bustle I was undistracted from reflection on the remarkable dexterity of the young barista whose work had had me mesmerised while awaiting my beverage.

I wondered whether there were any other jobs left in the modern world where the demonstrated attention to detailed and complex manual procedures performed at high speed had not been mechanised, whether such skills were transferable to a higher earnings bracket, as I am sure they were not being adequately rewarded where they were.

There is a lady who carries out similar tasks rather more slowly in the Liphook Sainsbury's Cafe, where I sometimes pause on shorter walks from home, who wields a J-cloth in the most disturbing fashion when attending to a steam-pipe dripping with just foamed milk. I do hope it is not just for my benefit.

I am having to remember I don't and won't have a bakery to stop at on the way to work now or a lunch-break to remind me to go to a café. My default daily calorie intake is down as a result by a sausage roll, a doughnut, some crisps and a bacon roll. It may have been a diet devoid of goodness but it was a diet of sorts.

Tomorrow I shall have a far healthier festive feast with my sister and her family and doubtless will feel uncomfortably full and suffer the wind of the sparsely-toothed for some while afterwards. I suppose that is what crimbo is all about.

Borders [2015]

Borders are just the boundaries of

Where sets of rules apply.

Where being different, for example,

You can live or you must die.

I don't want persecution

Of people like me

To wander free.

Neither do I want persecution of you.

______

Somewhere between

The far side of

The Middle East

And just over there

The rules change.

A transsexual stoned

In Seaside City

Is a

Recreational

Happenstance.

A transsexual stoned

In the Middle East

Is a

Public

Execution.

______

Especially,

I am wary of people

Who have been raised to

Believe it is their god's will to

Stone me.

Perhaps it

Is no surprise

I am wary of people

Who refuse to respect

Our bounded freedoms.

It is true,

You cannot see

Political boundaries

From the depth of space

But they are very real on earth,

This planet where we have to live.

______

Europe is an area of land.

It has hot bits and cold bits,

Flat bits and bumpy bits,

Bits that are dry and

Bits that are less so but,

It isn't the land that

Made Europe the magnet

For the disenfranchised

From elsewhere in the world.

______

Soil has no more or less problem than sand

With colour or gender or preference,

With who walks hand in hand

With whom or for why

They can't stand

Each other.

It's just

Land.

______

I am fifty-three, born

Only seventeen years

After World War Two.

When I was born a

European, peace was

barely old enough to

ride a motorcycle and

still too young to vote.

This year,

European Peace

Is seventy years old

And we take it for granted.

______

But it has taken people seventy years

Of tolerance, of understanding,

Education and co-operation

To get where we are,

To become where

Everyone else

Wants to

Be.

It didn't come for free.

______

We did not achieve this

Lasting peace in secret.

Our methods are in

The public domain.

______

Our methods are

The European public.

Our customs and practices,

Our rules and regulations,

Our laws and public behaviour

Are what makes Europe

And Europeans

Successful.

The peace

And calm,

The time

To think

Can no more

Be stormed

Or occupied

Than a pub's

Quiet ambience,

Its calm can be

Enjoyed

By anyone

If one

Pugnacious

Seeker

Of it destroys

The very thing

That drew them.

I heard a little girl sing a wartime song today [2014]

I heard a little girl sing a wartime song today, she sang
Words that resonate in me as a collective brave face,
As a desperate attempt at cheer in the face of death.

But that's not
How she sang it.

It was a song from the war after the one we remember
Having joined a hundred years ago today,
A song from the war fought by men whose fathers, uncles and
Elder brothers had fought the War To End All Wars,
Men who were under no illusions as to their likely fate.

But that's not
How she sang it.
______
______

The morning of Pride came to me slowly and slightly after noon.

An Eve of Pride Party had come to me hard and fast
Staying with me till some way after dawn.

It was fully light and already warm
When I fell to sleep beneath
The open window at the bed end
Of my just over bed-wide flat.

I slept soundly but only until the parade approached,
The crowd's enthusiasm rising and reaching its crescendo
As it passed along the road not seventy yards from where I lay.
______

My father, by now in generous old age,
Had been admitted to hospital a week before.

There an emergency tracheotomy had suddenly denied him
Both speech and the ability to feed except by tube for life.
______

I feel duty bound to experience the magical day
As proof of its existence and to have something to say

When I hospital visit my father, still twenty-four hours away.
______

I am hanging, a little stoned, it feels early and my mind is racing
At the finality of my father's situation and how desperately frustrating
And unsatisfying the remainder of his time will be, however long or short.

All the while I am making my way, against the flow of the crowd, toward the
Headspace I know I will find when I reach the sea and look out over what man
Has not since the dawn of time worked out how to colonise and fuck up like land.

It is my father's life that flashes through my mind while I dodge and weave through an
Oncoming shoal of unsubtly smuggled budgies and booty-shorts that shimmer in the sun.

I am not ashamed that I have tears on my cheeks at a carnival to celebrate the diversity of life.
______

I am head-wrestling my self.

It hurts as my emotions struggle
To take and hold my imagination,

Flitting as it always does between
Extremes of pleasure and of pain.

There is nothing more important in my world
Than my father lying uncomfortably in hospital.

I am today his eyes, his ears, his experience of
The world outside a sterile, single bedded room.

I cannot lie to him when I download as best I can my bedside head to his
So it is my bounden duty to make the truth of the day as entertaining as I can.
______

I have by now escaped the crowd and stand, battered sausage in hand, by the sea.

One pound and twenty pence invested in making a true story a little lighter to listen to.

My eyes are red with both tears and tiredness and the rings beneath are as puffy as puffy can be.

I am on my second convenience-store handy-pack of tissues as I now almost ignore the waves of

Sadness at projected imaginings of a time yet to be in a place or places unknown crashing against the rock

That is the reality of now, today, and all the days that have gone before to enable this one to be what it is.
______

I feel safe to lean against the railings above the beach
To look back at the land, to see how little has changed,
Then I think of the day and how much is very different.

I am hungry but can't face another battered sausage joke
So start walking back along the Promenade toward the pier.

I am thinking out now, looking around me, listening for detail
I can use to distract from my father's woes and maybe, just
Maybe, put a smile on his face when I see him tomorrow.

Three chrome-laden-Harley-boys rock up to the posing park,
Remove their helmets and as I pass by I hear them laughing,
About their bingo-wings billowing at speed on the motorway.

It’s the price of high bars and sleeveless vests and waistcoats
For all but the most Easy Rider scrawny of Peter Fonda wannabes.
______

Me, I like my arms.
They are not the finest, magazine grade
You might ever see
But you'd probably agree
They look right
With an all-over covering of skin
And that does it for me
______

I wear sleeves when I ride my bike
So as not to have to when I don't.
______

It's early evening and I am calm when I return to my one-bed wide flat.
My thoughts are still volatile but I have become used to cerebral bangs
And flashes of all the things I know not to write down in the moment.

I am not in the mood for an After-Pride Party but I will make the effort
Because that is what I have planned to do and I can't report back that I
Stayed in because I was miserable that one day soon my dad will die.

I shaved and showered, probably shat,
Making full use of all the facilities in the flat
I cooked myself something my father never would

Because he loved his son.

I never cared so much for me as did he.

I dressed and I walked the short road to the club
Where I drank and I smoked and danced to rub-a-dub dub.

It was long after dawn when I climbed into bed and
Set my alarm to leave just enough time to drive
Fifty miles into a summer Sunday afternoon.

To do my best at shutting out the shit
Of the whole sorry circumstance
And to ignore my yesterday
Insofar as I had mourned
The passing of much
Of what my
Father
Was

Yet
He was
Still there,
Albeit fragile.
______

I told my tale jokily
And raised a smile or two.

It was too soon to explain what I wanted,
That what I had witnessed the day before
With my own eyes, however blearily it was
And through however many tears of either
Sadness or of celebration, was proof positive
That he and his father had not lived in vain.

It isn't that they fought battles and won.
Instead, they demonstrated
How to do peace.
______
______

That is the key.

It's impossible to impose peace.

People have to notice how others achieve it.

If they amend their behaviour to match they achieve it, too.

It isn't about militarily suppressing revolt, anyone with firepower can do that.

Nor about scaring gullibles into brainwashed accord with outdated "divine" instruction manuals.

The best thing we can do to help those at war in far off lands is to keep doing exactly what we peacefully do.

Eventually they might notice, give it a go and discover how much easier peace is than war. If not it is their own loss.
______
______

It's not my job to save the world.
But if everyone behaved like me
There would be no religion or war.

Just saying.
_____

The song I heard the little girl sing was from my father's war.

It was his generation that wanted luck wished them
When their loved ones waved them goodbye.
______

My father was one of the very lucky ones,
He came home at the end of the war.
Having sung that song himself with
Friends and fellows who didn't,
A good few years before.

He will have sung it since in memory
Of those who were less lucky than he,
The chorus rising and rousing but empty
From those living in defiance for the dead.

But that's not
How she sang it.

The little girl sang the lyric with innocent enthusiasm,
With the broadest and happiest of smiles
She stripped it of all connotations,
She deleted its history files.
______

I wish my father had lived to hear it sung that way, too,
And that he had witnessed also Pride in Seaside City.
______

It is a hundred years since we entered the Great War
And nearly seventy since we emerged from the Second.
We have come a long way since Europe last fought.

A lot is said for the men, women and children who died.
Not enough is said for those who survived,
For those who made the changes
That enable us to enjoy
Our freedoms
Today,

That enable small children
To grow up here in peace
And in happiness
Without experience
Or knowledge of war.

Because that
Is how the little girl sang it
And because that
Made it special to hear.

© Po 2014

The System

My most recently FB-encountered proponent of dismantling the current "system", that which has evolved over many thousands of years and which has made life gradually easier for all those who engage with it than it would be for them to scratch a living from the earth with their bare hands, was a city-dwelling DJ, one who was pictured on their profile page living in a modest but softly furnished flat, fully clothed and smoking a suspiciously large, hand-rolled cigarette.

Were it not for the current "system" they would have no electricity, food, water, flat or furnishings, they would be naked and the only psycho-active substances available to them would be mushrooms and toadstools unlikely to be found growing nearby, and if they wanted to go anywhere else they would have to walk barefoot to get there.

They really haven't thought it through. Unless, of course, what they really want is for everyone else to continue to operate the current "system" and for themselves just to freeload.

We are all of us enlightened

Anyone who has discovered or re-interpreted something in such a way that it is their genuine belief that it is of unselfish benefit to humankind will have a link direct to the text of it from their FB page (if they have one) and not to a site charging upfront for downloadable copies of it.

A person who says they will make you feel better about yourself but who implies your guilt for the deeds of others or uses unpleasant or upsetting imagery as a tool in any part of their process is a manipulative git, not a guru.

And, of course, no sage worth their salt goes around quoting other people.

So, please, do not go looking for spiritual advice from anyone who either derives or intends to derive income [or elevated status] from giving it. 

The longer they can keep you from discovering that you already have what you seek, and that it is only the looking for it that is preventing you from finding it, the more they earn.

______

We are all of us enlightened

Unless we let some body

Convince us otherwise.

(© John Barrow (Po))

______

You have not been charged for reading this message

Three Little Piggies 2017

Three Little Piggies 2017

[Only the president's name has been changed]

_____

Across Europe houses are built of brick, stone, concrete and other durable materials.

Mediaeval houses had the stoutest of timber frames with solid infills. The timbers were connected with simple push fit joints and held in place with wooden pegs.

Even in the changing climate, at least for now, Europe does not suffer destructive typhoons and hurricanes.

Yet, in almost every photo of the aftermath of a seriously destructive storm in the USA I see a pile of wood, a bank, a pile of wood, maybe a hotel, a pile of wood, a gas station, a pile of wood etc..

I suspect even Donald Trump could be explained to that it isn’t just when big bad wolves huff and puff that houses of sticks and straw offer little protection.

Surely it is cheaper for the taxpayer to subsidise the building of strong houses that will last for generations, even in such vulnerable areas, than it is to deal with emergency evacuations and the constant rebuilding of homes just as fragile as those they must replace.

© John Barrow (Po) 2007 & 2017

7th Century Wiltshire Stand-Up

A traveller reaches a town and notices there are two people fastened at height to the outside wall of a Worship Clubhouse, one is dying and the other long dead. A grave is being dug in the Clubyard below. He asks a local standing nearby what has happened and is told:

“A month ago the dead man refused to pay to the Club his grain as tax and then just last week the dying man stole grain from the Club to feed his family.”

And the grave?

“The grave is for every man who pays his tax and who does not steal grain.”

[Raucous laughter erupts at the inn]

Anyway, ... The traveller is just about to continue on his way when the clouds burst and he and the local take shelter in the Worship Clubhouse.

After a few moments being dazzled by the blingtastic splendour of the building’s unexpectedly lavish interior, the traveller notices there is a dying man fastened at height to the inside wall of the Clubhouse, too.

As his eyes adjust to the glare he sees it is a statue of a man frozen in perpetual pain and quite intentionally denied death for all time. He asks the local what particular crime the poor fellow had committed that justified such savage and permanent reminding of it to all who enter the building.

“Him? He is the last guy who dissed the Club.”

[The inn was then raided by Heresy Squad officers and a number of arrests were made]

©2012 John Barrow (Po)

(I'm thinking not to write) Three Films. [2012]

The first is a fiction set in a Market Town at a remote intersection of trading routes across a wild 7th Century Wiltshire landscape, a town where merchants grow rich and pay their taxes to The Club, which in return keeps order, suppressing revolt among the underclass using collective threats so fantastic no one person dares test them for emptiness.

Officers of The Club make a point of demonstrating their violent capability on any member of the underclass who fails to achieve a safe distance as they pass. Random brutality, just common enough that everybody knows someone who has been a victim of it, is considered key to keeping the underclass afraid and obedient.

Most of the first reel is taken up by showing everyday life in the town, highlighting the relationships between the merchants, the underclass and The Club. Only at the beginning of the second reel do we meet the principal character, Steve, young and unmarried, a member of the majority underclass, who devises a plan to overthrow The Club.

Carefully and as quietly as possible, Steve begins recruiting members to his Rival Club. His manifesto promises an end to random brutality and a start to the sharing of the town's wealth more equally between its citizens such that all could be proud that no one in their town need starve or want for shelter. To the underclass this would be undreamed of luxury.

By the end of the second reel, though there are still only a handful of actual members of Rival Club, there is an uncustomary excitement among the underclass as word spreads of the hope being offered them for a brighter future.

The third reel is faster paced as news of Rival Club's existence and rapidly increasing popularity reaches The Club and its officers immediately carry out a spectacularly violent and unusually brutal, even by their own standards, demonstration of their continuing authority within the town, randomly selecting men to kill and women to rape as they set fire to houses in which children still hide.

The few who joined Rival Club stand, fight and are promptly despatched by officers of The Club. Hundreds of others are killed, too, many of them while helping their families to escape the town, leaping for their lives from its walls. Steve is nowhere to be seen.

Gradually those who have escaped gather together, just out of range of the arrows that every now and then still overfly the town walls. The camera pans across a dark sea of empty eyes and blank expressions, not one person yet able to comprehend what they have all witnessed, their fleeting dream having so suddenly become a reality more terrifying than their worst nightmare.

Orphaned infants wail, the luckiest in the arms of older siblings. The newly widowed hold tight to their children or grieve their loss alone. Few men have survived to follow their loved ones to freedom. Steve stands anonymously at the edge of the crowd, unharmed.

With the sky over the poorest quarter of the town glowing red with flame and with the air still filled with the screams of those unable to escape, one young mother recognises Steve near her. Her eyes lock to his and she asks him coldly, "Now what?" Steve says nothing, turns from the small crowd and walks slowly into the darkness of the Wiltshire night.

The survivors cannot return to the town. The wild landscape is vast and as poor townspeople who have never travelled they know nothing of its geography. As their adrenaline levels begin to fall they feel cold and resign themselves to having little choice but to all walk off into the darkness together, following the footsteps Steve left in the soft ground. Roll Credits.
______

The second fiction starts on the morning after the massacre, the sun rising slowly on a dishevelled band of cold, tired and hungry people, huddled together against the wind in silence. All are traumatised by what they have seen. None are yet able to speak of it.

The story is played out like a lightly comic road movie. Steve, no fleeter of foot than average, is patently unable to shake off his univited followers so he decides to organise them into a functional, self sufficient unit, making up rules for them as problems arise, often having to revise them later on when circumstance has changed.

It isn’t long before followers begin to realise Steve is just leading them round in circles and start openly questioning his wisdom. Each time a challenge to his authority arises, the camera follows Steve as he disappears off for a think before returning with a masterful piece of spin to keep his followers on side regardless of what has happened. As the challenges become greater, so Steve’s spin becomes more fantastic to counter them.

Steve’s masterplan is to grow his band of followers into an army with which to exact revenge upon The Club. Looking at those he has with him, it may take a while before they are ready.

Decades are skipped through with only significant events being shown. Battles are won and battles are lost. Many followers die in a single battle and Steve’s spin convinces only the few who remember the massacre in Market Town to remain loyal to him. For if they stop believing in his wisdom now they must accept they need not have believed it then and their loved ones need not have died.

Too few in number now to wage war on his behalf, Steve leads his handful of followers to the village of Other Market, only a few days travel from Market Town, hoping to settle into quiet obscurity.
______

The third and final fiction in the series begins in Other Market, where the quiet obscurity Steve by now craves is impossible to achieve. Other Market is a small village where no one goes unnoticed and through which many travellers pass en route to Market Town and Steve is soon identified and hauled before a public inquisition on the village green, the arrival of his reputation having preceded that of his physical being by a good many years.

In the eyes of the villagers, Steve’s attempt to settle anonymously in their midst is proof enough of his personal ambition alone being responsible for the massacre at the end of the first film and for all the deaths and woundings in battle his followers have suffered since.

Facing a lynching and already in the hands of the mob, Steve spins a speech to save his life and by the end of it has vowed his intent remains as ever it was and that he has not come to their village to hide but instead to raise and inspire a new army with which to drive The Club from Market Town.

After a few unsuccessful battles and some very creative spin to keep the momentum of his campaign up after each expensive loss, Steve does eventually raise an army of sufficient size and skill to carry out his original Rival Club manifesto promises, to liberate the underclass of Market Town and improve their lot.

While grateful at being liberated, there were many in Market Town who still carried scars from the last time they had placed their trust in Steve and they demanded an explanation as to why, if he believed in the infallibility of his mission as much as he had convinced everybody else to, he had run away at the first sign of trouble, as he had been witnessed by a number of survivors to have done. Steve has a very long think before spinning another speech to save his life again before a very uncertain crowd.

To those who don’t remember the massacre, Steve is their liberator, their rescuing hero. To those who do, rich or poor, Steve is a cowardly liar. Demographics have it that Steve becomes Mayor of Market Town and he immediately makes challenging his authority an offence punishable by death and demonstrates its enforceability.

Steve’s regime is no less brutal than that in any other town in England at the time but the brutality is less random in its delivery to members of the underclass than it was The Club. Now a law has to be broken and there is a punishment to fit each crime.

Steve’s laws are strict, and public punishment is always painful, often permanently damaging and sometimes fatal. When Steve is discovered to have failed to follow his own law he spins yet another speech to save his life, inventing new detail in the law as he goes to permit his own transgression to go unpunished and to enable any such future trangressions to go undiscovered. No one challenges his authority so to do.

It isn’t long before the law has been detailed as much as it needs to be for Steve and those close to him to enjoy freedoms denied to others under the same law and the practice of re-detailing law all but dies out.

The office of Mayor of Market Town and the associated absolute authority within the town walls is passed down through generations of Steve’s family until a period of unrest in the wider county brings the peaceful stability of Market Town under threat again from the latest incarnation of The Club.

On learning of the threat, the incumbent Mayor takes the town's cash and flees to the hills, promising to return with a mercenary army as soon as he can and leaving the town gates open so The Club won't need to break them down to get in.

Roll credits over images of decades passing with no sign of the promised rescue as poverty and oppression under The Club re-establish themselves with a vengeance in Market Town. Cut in shots of the missing Mayor growing old and dying in a comfortable, distant palace.
______

But I just know that many years from now, when my trilogy has all but faded from memory, when everybody knows the names of my films and considers them classics but everybody who ever saw them has died, someone will revive Steve’s legend, selectively amending it to suit their time and intent.

By gifting Steve with as many superpowers as the person revising my script considers their audience will have to swallow to cover the gaps created in its sense by their heavy handed approach to abbreviation, a new story will emerge, quite different from mine.

Of course, once SuperSteve has been given magic powers it will be implied that his descendents would naturally be similarly blessed and that it would therefore be perfectly possible that the missing Mayor, the cowardly liar who died behind the credits of my original film, could yet come back with his promised army of liberation.

Then the Market Town PR machine will kick into high gear and the gullible poor will give their hard earned money back to the rich for the privelege of waiting, exactly as instructed to in SuperSteve’s rewritten dialogue, for the missing Mayor to return to free them from poverty and oppression rather than challenge whichever Mayor it is who is keeping them poor and oppressed at the time.

For safety reasons, I remind you that my trilogy of fictions is set in a wild 7th Century Wiltshire landscape and that my principal character is called "Steve".

Hundreds of years will pass before the fourth film is made and the trouble really starts.

© 2012 John Barrow (Po)

Amongst other more profound one-line advices ...

Amongst other more profound one-line advices that had made me famous
When people passed them on in inns and hostelries across the land,
If I had suggested, a thousand years ago, that everyone should

Travel by the swiftest available means of transport
Rather than waste their lives on the journey

It is likely those who took my advice
Would travel on horseback,
As, indeed, would I.

And as would be noticed,
By a hang-around scribe.
______

After my death,
To make a few quid
The hang-around scribe
Expands the few snippets
Of common sense I had used
To draw attention to flaws in the
System in to a first-hand biography.

His version of me picked up a good following
So others, too, wrote their expansions of my story.

But common sense is unexciting and soon assimilates into
Everyday life and the relevance of whence it came diminishes.
______

Turn the clock forward to just a hundred and fifty years ago. I am history.
______

Scribes are ten-a-penny now and one decides to make his own fortune by rewriting
The long forgotten story of me, updating it to make it relevant for a modern readership.
______
______

If I had suggested a hundred and fifty years ago that everyone should

Travel by the swiftest available means of transport
Rather than waste their lives on the journey

It is likely those who took my advice
Would travel by steam train
As, indeed, would I,
_____

The Victorian usurper of my reputation, however,
Wrote that everyone should travel only by
Steam train on the routes he was the
Owner of and made his fortune.

He died a very rich man,
As did his inheriting sons
Until
The age of steam died, too.
_____

It is century 21 now, according to local convention,
And my advice would be the same as it always has been,
That everyone should

Travel by the swiftest available means of transport
Rather than waste their lives on the journey.

It is likely those who took my advice today
Would ride bicycles and motorcycles,
Drive cars and lorries and ride
In buses and on trains
Of any kind, on
Aeroplanes,
In boats

As, indeed, would I

According to the
Journey I
Took.
______

So why would anyone now

Be limited to travel only by horse
Because it is what a scribe wrote
I had done a thousand years ago?

And why would anyone now

Be wrestling with their inner conscience
As to whether to only travel by train
To only travel by steam train
Or not to travel at all
Because the old
Routes have
Closed
Or,
Worse,
Moved into
Public ownership
For the benefit of all?

And why would anyone now

Be killing anyone in my name
Over a mode of transport
Or route they choose
To achieve their
Destination?
______

Where on earth
Would be the
Sense in that?

© Po 2014