death of the middle classes

Why are the intelligent people - at least among the white middle class - so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy! (James Hillman)

I'm sure psychotherapy is a cul de sac - the doctrinal police ensuring that nothing relating to the psyche could overlap with the similarly falsely-demarcated stuff of sociology or politics or...heaven forbid, that the psyche should possess an indivisible union with nature...

But the middle class in the UK does not go in for wholesale therapy and they are undoubtedly, when their material wealth is taken into account, the most dismal and useless caste in the history of humanity. At least their Victorian forbears could claim dynamism whilst raping mother nature, but the twenty-first century bourgeois merely hibernates in a smug pit of consumerist toxicity.

But the death of the middle class charade will shortly be announced: the paltry vestiges of their ill-gotten gains, their dreary value-system will be wrecked in the natural catastrophe they have orchestrated. I find it unbelievable that all but the very cynical of their number (politicians mainly) still really believe in consumer society and the politics of choice and university education a decent pension and all the rest of it, as a long term proposition. If ever failure to adapt to a change in environment was a harbinger of extinction this is it...the intrinsic nature of the middle class is directly, and utterly, undermined by ecological crisis. If you remove the foundations the whole house collapses, obviously.

If their crimes weren't so horrendous it would be tragic, or at least ironic. Knowledge that knows nothing, just accumulates in the absence of any moral core. Niceness constructed upon ruthless violence against the 'othered'.

There can be no excuse for ignorance or complacency when you are teetering at the end of it all.

Remembrance...

I don't buy a poppy.

Why? Well, forget the fact that Tony Blair wears one despite committing British troops to a futile war for even more spurious reasons than many of those whose victims we commemorate today. Forget the insulting nature of of a paltry two minutes in a year to 'honour' those who 'defended a freedom' which is even more hypothetical today than it was fifty years ago, or that we should supplement the state's blood money through an 'appeal'.

Ignore the abject nature of commemoration itself - a prop for the powers-that-be and thus a substitute for real change to a status quo which requires war to invigorate itself from time to time.

The reason is simple: as a father I understand the magnitude of the loss of a child. Any child. The sanctity of life informs everything I do. I usually fail, but my effort to be non-violent is a constant one. That's why remembrance, then back to business as usual, disgusts me.