Compliance to unreasonable demands triggers a chain reaction that reverberates through history.
Who remembers a Britain where for a few decades at least, the worst thing your political or religious views could do to your life was a bit of a scrap in your local or a family row over dinner? Who remembers a Britain in which your medical information was strictly confidential, and medical treatments and tests were given only after informed consent, and only by highly trained appropriate professionals?
How many of us believed we’d find ourselves in a place where the accepted political view on any given topic has become the new religion; complete with rites and rituals, mantras and costume; endorsed by wanker celebrities, repeated on a loop 24/7 by goldfish automaton “news” carriers, all happy to vilify, ridicule and “shame” those strange, inscrutable “differently thinking” individuals whose very existence seems to cause them unbearable discomfort and rancour? Where bullying in the workplace has become the sport of choice for government officials and company executives, who now spend their weekends lusting after gagging orders, for the persecution and segregation of the cerebrally controversial, independently wired “differently thinking” citizens.
How many of us imagined we’d find ourselves undergoing illegitimate compulsory “testing” of completely healthy people, by ill-informed, inappropriately trained henchers, at airports, supermarkets, and places of work and leisure? How many of us envisaged being persistently harassed by employers to be injected with a controversial “revolutionary” new medical treatment with absolutely zero long term safety data? The same employers threatening that if we refuse to surrender to these demands, we’ll be unceremoniously, unlawfully dismissed without pay, pension, recourse to justice, compensation or a means to provide for our families... does this sound in any way rational, democratic or acceptable to you?
Well, here we all are. My errant, independently-abled brain is now singing David Byrne lyrics. “How did I get here? My God, what have I done?”
Compliance to unreasonable demands triggers a chain reaction that reverberates through history. I’ve reached the unpleasant realisation that failure to turn up, failure to turn out to represent ourselves right now, at this pivotal time, is not an option. The time of pointing fingers at politicians, of blaming other people for our plight, is over. You have you to blame if you don’t speak up, speak out, and take action to stop the course toward which we’re being steered at an ever-increasing pace.
Ex-Quantas pilot Graham Hood quite rightly said in his impassioned speech to humanity, “don’t just sit at home saying: ‘why don’t they do something about it’... YOU are the “they” in this scenario. We are the “they”. We need to act. We need to do something about it. Don’t look around for someone to come to save you. We save us. Nobody else is coming any time soon. We make our own destiny.
In one of many intensely moving scenes in “Dark Waters”, when lawyer Rob Bilott (played by Mark Ruffalo) having painstakingly established the evidence that Teflon peddlers Dupont had caused thousands of cancers and death, the company, having given the impression they were about to settle a class action suit, decided to backtrack. They insisted victims would need to fight every case separately in court. Distraught, and exhausted after more than eleven years of scraping away the layers of legal protections surrounding this vile, deviant company, Rob Bilott makes this same moving observation of our obligations to save and change our own outcomes and destiny:
“They’re rejecting the science panel. They’re gonna fight every individual claim. Thousands of people... sick people... they’ll give up. They can’t fight Dupont. They’re a Titan of industry. They can do whatever they want. They want people to say ‘look everybody... even he can’t crack the maze, and he helped build it’. They want to show the world it’s not worth fighting. The system is rigged. They want us to think it’ll protect us - but that’s a lie. We protect us. We do. Nobody else. Not the companies, not the scientists, not the government; us... a farmer with a twelfth grade education told me that... On day one... he knew... and I thought he was crazy... isn’t that crazy?”
Rob’s wife answers: “Yes. Yes it is”.
It definitely is crazy.
In such a world, what’s definitely crazy is that we even think for one minute that it isn’t crazy; that we can even think for one second that it might be us who’s gone crazy, and maybe the world’s OK as it is.
It isn’t OK, and at this point, it’s crazy to carry on believing that it is.
