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john_other_john | 11 years ago
'I was skint, I couldn't get a job and I hadn't paid my tax,' adds Winstone, who declared himself bankrupt in 1988 and 1993.
'I had two choices. I could either go and sign on and get my flat paid for or go to work.
'I chose to go to work and I paid all my debts off.'
....
[sic] "I could sign on and get my flat paid for"
The DM is known for right wing bias, but Winstone is known for left wing support, and you can make of the whole thing wherever you like, but the truth remains much the same today: you can go and sign on for benefits, and get your rent paid for. That's a amazing thing, if your life falls through the cracks. But it is a way of life. I have had friends explain to me how they chose to "go on the sick", one after a epileptic fit. That person does suffer epilepsy, or something similar, but the fits I witnessed coincided with being involved in a frightening relationship based as far as I could tell, on access to a boyfriend's money to indulge a long term heroin habit. I'd in ten years not seen or known of a fit, before that abusive blow out, and meanwhile her habit had been paid for by renting out her provided home, at a discount to, but still substantial profit on, market rates, whilst she lived with her partner in squats. This is not a exceptional example.
We now have even fourth generation children of families who have never worked a regular job.
And a vast health service burdened in so many ways my head spins.
They took away the notion of self responsibility.
That, as far as I can see it, is my prognosis for the terminal decline that is wreaking havoc in every walk of life.
We call for education "reform".
Reform usually means slow action, changing structures piecemeal or adjusting parameters in a technocratic ideal.
But, blinkers off, what took generations to rot, to completely decompose, may not be resuscitated if the conditions of good growth are poisoned soil.
Please forgive me my outpourings.
I lucked out in early life in so many ways.
And I screwed up big time, about a decade or so ago.
It's taken ten years work, not nine to five or even hours I could count, but a wholesale reeducation of this once super privileged, highly educated, young man, to just begin to reclaim the advantages I had.
What hope, then, those who fell through the same gaps in life, which I did, who did not benefit from a unrivalled academic education? People think I boast, rest on laurels, when I mention my young years. BS. I am highlighting just how harsh this system is. And the safety net that is provided, amazing though it be on paper, is totally alien to people of comparable upbringing to me (distorted also by genuinely Georgian era parents) and I could surmise my experience as being that alienation is in fact a class distinction, highly archive in this (to parrot John Major)" classless society". Rot. Class divisions have never been more acute. If Marx did not choke himself to death whilst reading our papers, he might laugh at the ridicule of social inversion, where now the lowest are elevated to national priorities, where the intelligence of the proletariat as worshipped by Tolstoy has become the fattened (on junk food), indigent (on "benefits" and "entitlements")and uneducated (c.f. all the above) idle class.
This was the reality, into which Tony Blair, and coterie, believes mass immigration would instill a work ethic and a hunger for self betterment. I and my friends often receive taunts, for being friends across race lines, in a majority immigrant, second to third gen, neighborhood. So I could care less for racialist nonsense. But consider the sheer scale of the solution that was promoted, to solve a problem that whilst occasionally identified, is still verboten speech in true debate.
As programmers, however many LOCs we debug a day, we should be gravely concerned as to the trivialization where supers, "3M" ideals, of twenty years ago are pocket sized stolen currency for hits of crack, and the technology is more seen as a vector against which state must protect children, or swoop in SWAT style upon admittedly amoral copyists of entertainment. The charade of the BBC, on the recent SONY hack, tells us all; a self proclaimed hacker was not interviewed but subjected to faux indignation, asked what right he had to spoil innocent childrens' appreciation of their new PS4s. We ought to be indignant instead at the presumption that technology exists for such trivial gratification. I guess anything which is potentially apolitical, is soon co-opted by political interests. But where is the promise of individual capability that once switched on and delivered a BASIC interpreter at a prompt? There's progress, measured by landfills, but where is that promise? There is the political disaster of technology, as affects us all. I want to scream at adverts for employees, asking for skills in using Microsoft word. Not because word might actually need ability in macro scripting, but because I thought the necessity to specify elementary ability with computers should have died out by the time I was in my thirties. I guess, too, that much of life is a disappointment. Software became a pseudo- religious ground, arguably, and all systems close to money will fight within themselves. But lately it seems to me every website was reinventing the wheel of a basic text editor, and I started to cry a little, inside. Not least because perfection never came for a word processor. But because I don't know in what direction this technology is going, not beyond the "d'oh-horizon" of jargon, the realization of the omits of monikers such as "cloud computing", but more generally, I could not see a direction. The proverbial revolution seems to have come and gone without revolving much at all. But look now, and everything I see does amaze me, it's wonderful. The riches make me cry. But they seem to make those who would rather attain riches without any work, cry the louder. I have never imagined there could be such a polarization of have and have not, for real, in my lifetime, growing Jo as I did, in the safe illusion of the late seventies, but I feral it now, and what we do, and no amount of web n.x hipsterism is changing this detrimental dynamic. One is only cool for so long, and the cooling cycle is on better than web time, beyond nay hope that politicians, or those involved, might ever catch up, let along "get with" any program.
If I go on, i'll be searching for New Year's Resolutions, so i'll just beg once again forgiveness for my personal outflowing of worry, and say a little prayer that there's the ingenuity to find solutions that are not mere rehashes or inversions of the same old problems.
eli_gottlieb|11 years ago