Things we need to deal with

Just watch any edition of the news and you’ll find a shit load of things we need to deal with. We live in a world where we are comfortably numb to many of the inconvenient truths that surround us. We consume the news, if even we choose to do that, and then we get on with our lives. We acknowledge that things are not great and wonder how we can possibly influence people to change, how we could grab the attention of enough people to entice others to change. Even if we would have a great idea, we often feel powerless to make it happen. I know that feeling.

I consume a lot of news but as I sit at home, I wonder what could I realistically do to help create change and what would I change. I appreciate that my level of influence is quite limited and as someone who works freelance, much of my thinking is taken up by thoughts of how to generate the next pay cheque. It’s hard to think about ‘saving others’ or the planet for that matter when survival is top of your list – I most certainly get that.

I suppose my deliberations are my own small contribution to help nurture change. Perhaps small snippets from each blog, the little snippets that might make you stop and think, will magnify the bits you need to take notice of and create a stronger ripple effect. And if people begin to act as a result, then it will have the desired effect, or even if it begins to raise awareness or pricks the consciousness of each person its purpose has been served.

We need political discourse that is transparent and realistic, based on hard evidence, produced by scientific rigour or processes akin to it, and is located in the context of long-termism. So rather than manifestos based on 5-year cycles, we need 20-year National Development Plans with cross-party support that whoever is voted into power, their job is to implement that plan.

We need to deal once and for all with poverty, address inequality, rough sleeping and treat climate change as the global emergency it is. We need to take the lead, that we will begin the process, taking the steps necessary to arrest the slide into global devastation, grab the moral high ground as it were, country by country if it that’s what it takes until countries no longer want to be seen to be the climate pariah.

We need to reduce the working week to allow people a better work-life balance, share the work available so that everyone has a job, introduce a safety net such as Universal Basic Income or some kind of Social Dividend that removes the stresses and pressure of struggling to put food on the table, or deciding whether its heat rather than food you can afford, or even if indeed you have a roof over your head.

We need to finally draw a line under things like racism in any form as being acceptable – to be having to still deal with racism of any kind in this day and age, even the milder forms of it for example, and our continued seemingly softly-softly approach to it is just unacceptable. It has to end! We need to protect minorities much better than we do, ensure that prison is actually a place of rehabilitation, reduce endless consumption, stop the sexualisation of children and young people, modern slavery, and domestic violence once and for all. There is so much to deal with. We need cross-party systems and processes that abandon ideological doctrine and deal with the shit that is smack, bang in front of us