In exposing the machinery of the System, it is important to remember at all times that this is not an abstract thing. There are real and direct consequences that ordinary people live every day of their lives. Dispossession of land leaves only one “future” where all other resources are gradually placed beyond reach – homes, education, healthcare, transport – the consumer must be squeezed for the highest price. Tax revenues from the Public will no longer be wasted on providing services for the Public. The customer becomes the enemy who must be sold the least amount of value for the highest possible price. The environment is a resource that is utilised to the point of destruction.
No education, no home of my own, no dignity, no future, no health. Danger from the cars on the road, the food in the supermarket. Danger from the sun, from the air, from the water. Danger from the radioactive cot all the way through to the cancelled pension and the gas disconnection. This is a cradle-to-grave endowment of disregard for life at every stage. There is a pattern to be seen by all apart from those who do not wish to look or stop or think or give up their own privilege. A toxic provision that thins out the population.
And while they’re having public enquiries to make inconsequential, unenforced amendments to their law, another upward statistic as another one bites the dust. Accidents will keep happening. No progress. Quite the reverse. A slow dispossession, an increasingly psychopathic environment.
Population control is policy success. They don’t care if we die. Would you say they care when they sanction the entitlements of a disabled person and leave them to starve and freeze in their rented home? Or lose their rented home and die on the street instead? The cynical disregard of the State is their undeniable action, the picture that paints a thousand words before they’ve even opened their mouths to spin the truth into another lie.
They? They being people just following their time-refined job description to make the best economic decision. It’s the System that kills but a System needs Agents who will just do their job.
We know it and live in fear of the drop. Relegation from the lowest paid jobs to the boundless, futureless, featureless realms of wageless existence. No status. No opportunity. The employee becomes the unemployed and sinks back into the underclass.
Now forced to inhabit the dark, cold world of nothingness, he eats the crap food and sneezes in the damp flat. The cold turns to pneumonia and he is taken to the dreaded Accident and Emergency. Underfunded, overstretched, they dish out the wrong drug in the panic of the manic hour of which there are too many now. The wrong drug, the wrong operation, the wrong doctor and the absence of will to fix it all. Miraculously he emerges intact and runs straight into another statistic as he boards the fatally underfunded public transport disaster. It crashes, killing five but miraculously he survives and grows a little older, remembering how it was when times were better, before the redundancy, the divorce, the homelessness, the heart condition. What happened to the Safety Net? They removed it when people stopped caring about the fate of others worse off than themselves, without ever thinking that one day that might be him, me, you.
He’s on his own now. He rages against the injustice that an Employee who climbed so high should fall so far. He was the sharp suited apparition of State Will. It was truly him through and through just doing his job in his workday shining armour. Suit and tie’s the main disguise. Official duty telling lies. He said the word “No” and another one died. And now, betrayed, it’s his turn. Another one to add to those steadily ascending statistics.
The defining betrayal came. He got it from someone else exactly as he gave it out. It was his turn to sit on the other side of the desk, and someone else’s turn to say “No”. Destiny and irony and relentless recurrence. What got put around came around and was how he got his. What was done was finally done unto him. And it is how we will all get ours.
He chose the risky option, the only one available, and now it’s time to pay. He’s been removed, his share of the spoils of popular dispossession have expired. If we make a life out of attacking the dispossessed we must always live in fear of betrayal by the Boss.
Systems like this one don’t do anybody any real favours. There are no winners, not even the Agents who are condemned to always approach the day when they must die in fear. In this system there are only losers and bigger losers.
But we’re all winners if we share. Or shall we carry on, praying instead that we do not ourselves become the underclass?