Thoughts on the thumbs up for Trump Heights

There's also a melancholic sense of foreboding about it for me. Like the photo is from the future we knew one day would come to pass if we stuck with the easy option and carried on doing nothing. Allowing the decayed fruits of our pathological refusal to take hold of destiny's reigns to play itself out uncontested. Because people think if you don't try, then you can't fail. And if you can't fail, then you'll never have cause to know the fear of being blamed for making things worse because there was no one else present willing to risk anything.

But yeah, the photo was like a shot of melancholic deja vu in me veins, because I seel and feel the same lack of regard, that same degree of faux indifference towards the collective fate of our species, stronger than ever before. And I say 'faux' because we know what we're doing. There's only so long the urgency of warning sirens can be dismissed or ignored for, because eventually their unrelenting insistence that you act right now starts overwhelming all of the other sounds you were able to hear clearly. Even the mind's own voice.

So I'm concerned about the impact on our collective mental health going into the future especially if we continue to maintain a position of disinterest regarding the direction of our species' fate and its ultimate destination, a place which at this moment is no doubt plastered all over with red flags that are waving themselves to try and warn us to act now because this is really happening. 

Imagine Our Own Future Before Power Imagines One For Us

I feel like precisely because imagining the future which comes after this seems impossible, is the reason why we have to start imagining it. 

Otherwise the future we end up getting to live in we will have had no part in creating, and there are enough politicians and leaders of all kinds out there only too happy to design a future for everyone else to live in if it means they get to write the rules.

As difficult as it may seem, I feel like now is the perfect time for people to try and imagine what they want to happen after this, and seek out others who also share the same hopeful sentiment. Living in a future in which everyone has had a hand in making, no matter how small it may seem, is a really important thing in terms of having a sense of joint ownership about something everyone helped to build.

And that desire to seek out others who think and feel similarly to the way you are right now will be essential in order to galvanise people together into a cohesive whole, able to work as one. Because the only other option or road that springs easily to mind right now is one which leads to despair and total submission to the external forces that usher, steer and coerce us into doing what it thinks is best, if we choose not to do anything at all and remain stagnant.

That does sound proper dystopian, and even a bit hysterical when read in one go, but if you would have told me 2 months ago that very soon I would find myself staying in my house for 5 weeks straight in a bid to help save people's lives, then I would have mentioned that you didn't have to watch the entirety of Black Mirror in one sitting. 

But here we are! 

The truth of what's happening sounds just as wild as fiction right now, which is exactly why the way the story continues is so up for grabs. Everyone has writers block because the true extent of the reality we're in still remains unknown. Which is precisely why imagining a future that personally gives you hope is so necessary.

We Have Snapped Out Of Our Self-Delusion and Self-Denial

It seems 5:30am to get some shopping in is nowhere near early enough! ASDA was completely log jammed before sunrise.

I don't know how it is in your town, but in mine I'm pretty sure you could get Huw Stephens on BBC news to announce on all TV channels simultaneously that the Bubonic Plague, Black Death and Small Pox had all returned to our shores once more, but even more deadly this time around, and the people in my village would still remain crammed together lined up in queues filling every aisle of ASDA, stockpiling bog roll and Findus Crispy Pancakes, their trollies bumper to bumper as they debate amongst themselves just how fast you would die after contracting the new strains of these classic diseases, while standing face to face and inhaling each other's breathy responses, complaining how they are still too socially awkward to wear a face mask in public because it's just "not me". 

To the people in my local ASDA it appears as though the job of curbing the spread of a contagious new disease they know endangers the lives of people who are vulnerable by simply covering their mouths with a bit of material, remains an act only Chinese people and trendy looking hipsters from London do. Not them.

Put a fucking mask on your germ dispenser will you. Especially if you want to sneeze, cough and belch in public with abandon yer dirty bastard!

If doing something so self-evidently necessary in order to increase the speed with which we all get through this growing social crisis, then how the hell do we expect to be able to make the internal self-changes in our behaviours to ensure the Earth remains a place our kids have clean air to breathe and fresh clean water to drink? 

In general, the level of self-delusion and self-denial coursing through the whole of Western society is painful to watch continue, even when the vision of the end of everything is facing us in plain sight. Instead, our answer is to retreat back into our fantasy land of Netflix again to try and overwrite the truth of our reality.

Our deeply embedded habit of avoiding the truth about what's happening to us, here and now in the present moment, refusing to accept the cold facts of our situation until it's far far too late, is something we have to snap out of today.

Facts Are Like Bricks. Assumptions Are Like Bricks Which Vanish When Facts Turn Up.

A fact is like a brick. It's concrete. Something you know you can build a structure with that will stand by itself when completed. As long as the ground upon which it's been built isn't subsiding.

An assumption is like a brick which instantly vanishes when the fact it claimed to be calls BS and outs it as a fraud. 

Losing the odd brick near the top of what you built isn't so bad. Holes created so high up don't have much weight to bear. But losing bricks at the base of what you've constructed isn't so good. When facts suddenly turn up at your house telling your assumptions to GFTO then you have several options.

Close your door in the face of the facts and go back inside. But sooner or later your house will start creaking, then groaning, before collapsing.

Or see if at first the facts will fit in the spaces your assumptions used to be. Or strip the house back to re-lay where the facts should be and build your house up once again. Or just demolish it completely, and start from scratch if you have the energy, and know how to build houses. Just never ever fall for the illusion that you can live in someone else's dream. Never buy a Barrett or Persimmon Home.