The Politics of Division

You know? Now that I'm saying what I want and doing what I feel without pandering to any type of audience I'm actually beginning to get excited about writing again. I feel a certain flair for artistry and a fire that's burning in the pit of my belly urging me to write some more when I feel a little lazy. Now that I'm just doing my own thing I actually couldn't be happier. Let's get this show on the road.

I'm not a fan of what's going on in the world right now. Really not a fan. 2020 has been probably the most stressful and horrific year that I've been on this planet and it doesn't seem to be letting up.

We are a species of forgetters. We forget where we have come from and the journey we have underwent. The triumphs we've made, and the sacrifices we've had to go through to get to where we are today. If you examine history a little bit closer then you'll know humanity has been less than perfect. Let's have a look.

In Ancient times, a famous woman called Hypatia was a Greek philosopher and Mathematician. It was around the time Catholicism was gaining power in the Roman Senate. You see, Catholicism was becoming popular amongst the Roamn soldiers, and fearing a rebellion, the powers that be decided to ascend the religion into the halls of governance and claiming it as the official Roman religion. Thus sparked about a hundred years of people finding, "the spear of Peter" in caves and such like. Around thus time science was being shunned and sparked up quite an opposition from new religious leaders.

It was thought that philosophers were untouchable at the time, but one fateful day Hypatia was taken from her carriage and her skin stripped from her body with seashells. Quite gruesome, isn't it? Anyway, this sparked a great shockwave over the empire and one thing led to another where science had completely gone underground. When they realised it was eventually time to start focusing on the great wonders of the Greek philosophers and scientists again, the understanding of the old texts were lost, and rather than admit defeat the Roman senate outlawed science.

Ever heard of the dark ages? Yeah, well, what followed were those times.

Have you ever heard when Galileo proposed that the Earth actually revolves around the sun and that we weren't the centre of the Universe? Yup. He was burned at the stake for his misthoughts. How dare he even think differently to the church, right?

These are just two examples in a long array of stories I have going forward. I'll spare you the details. But in short, humans haven't had a great way of dealing with compromise in the past, or the present for that matter. Hitler convinced his entire country that Jews, for the sole purpose of "just being a Jew" should be exterminated. And make no mistake, Jews were hunted for sport -- this wasn't your average discrimination. This was full on extermination. Genocide even.

You can pretty much do anything when you make people believe that their problems are elsewhere and not their own to deal with. Why do I say this?

All through my twenties I thought there was this invisible force holding me back. A cackling entity in the shadows that whenever I had some form of luck it was there to jump out and take it away from me in some form. I thought my luck was bad and my eternity was cursed.

It wasn't until I was about 27 that I realised I was the main person holding me back from anything. I hadn't considered the concept of how I appear to others, nor even the idea of cause or effect -- and possibly my reputation that comes with that too.

You see, I was a drinker.

I loved my drink, boy did I. Any chance I could get I would go down to my local shop and buy whatever was available to get me drunk quickly, and sharpish. Sometimes that would even mean taking days off work so that I could get hammered without having to deal with a full days work at the same time.

But when I quit I realised something. I mean my drinking was a surface problem. The deeper problems were my sleepless nights, the anxiety, the nervousness, and the hating myself. Oh boy the hating myself. Drinking made that all go away, but actually it brought along with it it's very own dangerous set of problems too. Memory loss, acting like a dick, and perhaps doing stuff I wouldn't normally do and be horrified afterwards.

When I stopped drinking my life was surprisingly more easier to deal with. I had been getting wankered every night since I was about 14. I was now 27 and I describe that moment as my great awakening -- when I felt like a child in a grown mans body. All that I should have been learning I wasn't because I had been concentrating too much with where my next beer was coming from and how would I get it. So I had to learn, and learn fast. And boy did I learn.

Anyway, that's besides the point. The point that I'm making is that I spent my entire twenties thinking that other people were holding me back when in actual fact it was my own self and my attitude to life and everyone else around me that was holding me back.

I can't stomach the climate anywhere except on the cryptosphere right now. Those guys hate talking Politics and the structures that enable them. Those are my people. I've had enough of Politics to last me a damn lifetime. My favourite shows have all been ruined in favour of a poorly written preachy message about morality over and over and over again. What people don't seem to understand is that if I wanted to talk or read about Politics then there's places where I'd go for that -- not on my sci fi channel, or favourite Youtuber per se. But again, that's off topic.

The point that I'm making is that it seems that right now we're all at a junction in life, or at least the west is. Half are being pulled one way, and half are being pulled the other way. Yet no-one seems to understand that each and every one of us have more in common than we do apart.

My friend is a hardcore Donald Trump supporter, right? At first I was going to rage and be mad about it but then I remembered all the good times we shared together in childhood, the discovery years in our late teens. The barbeques, the late night talking, the drinking, the sort of relationship that someone fosters over twenty years that you don't just want to give up because of an opinion. So instead of going all reactionary and raging on him and telling him that he was a racist blah blah, I asked him why?

And he told me quite frankly. That because under libertarian governments he had lost his house, his job, his money, and that would have never had happened were it conservative. That's something I can relate to him right there on a deep level, except we were dirt poor and couldn't afford new clothes under a conservative government. And now that I'm a bit better off than I've ever been I tend to vote in things for people that have never had a chance like I have. I'd have never received the mental health support I did under the conservatives, in fact right now they've taken all the money that was around for people like me and put it into something else.

But I don't blame my friend. He's my friend for god's sake. He has his reasons too. And as I question him he wants all the same things as I do too.

It's how they get us every time. They divide us and we don't even see it.

Take children for example. One side thinks mothers should be protected because it's essential for the child. The other side thinks father should be more protected because it's essential for the child. IF we just focused on that we both wanted essential growth for children then we'd all be in agreement. But that's how they divide us. They spin it, and get us divided in the trivialities and have us forget about the overarching goal.

There's a huge argument on twitter right now about how #alllivesmatter is racist and #blacklivesmatter should be what's said. Am I missing something or are people basically saying that lives matter? Both seem quite an honourable slogan if you ask me. Lives matter, seems both have that goal in mind. I don't see either is racist, or a problem.

If they can't divide us at the top level then they dig deeper. If you ask people from the other side of the equation lots of questions then you'll find out that you both agree on far more than you disagree with. Sure, your methods of reaching your conclusion might be different but you're still all seeking the end result.

And that's how they get us. What do you think is stronger? A nation that agrees that children and lives matter unanimously? Or a nation that in-fights about the technicalities in which they are going to reach the conclusions?

This isn't new stuff by the way. It's been done so many times before, and it will again. Just like with Hypatia, Galileo, and Hitler, and many, many civilisations before and after.

Peace.

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