Save the Holy Headland: 2017 Year of Revolutionary Love

Sunday, 1 January 2017

2017 Year of Revolutionary Love

Poor head-crazy primate Homo sapiens is in a collective confusion, riddled with angst, broiling with aggression and fundamental fear. Ah, if only he knew his true nature.

We’re at a crossroads – like in the 1930’s – only now we have nuclear weapons. We know now that the survival of the world depends upon swift international cooperation to cease the poisoning of this, our beautiful and mysterious home-planet whilst we still have the ghost of a chance.

A new monster rises in the west. A long shadow falls across the world, merging into the darkness of Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Daesh, Israel and all. Few countries are innocent. Few individuals are guilty. If our authoritarian power structures are not working for us, then we must tear them down. Life must change – or life will cease. A fresh mind is required to face a problem like this, not a stale mind. Will the comforts of beer, consumerism and TV keep us asleep forever?

Can we ever learn from history? Or will we go complacently to our doom? To be honest with you folks, I’m kind of worried about that drunken gorilla that’s just taken over U.S.A. He seems to embody ignorance, and that’s a very dangerous thing. The thing with Chump is, essentially, Chump IS Capitalism. He is its monster-spawn, its misbegotten eldritch halfling, its product. Growing up in a monstrous situation, how could he fail to grow up a monster, it’s always the same with these kids from bad homes. If the parents had had to live in reality like most of us, this would never have happened. But since they grew up deprived of all of life’s morally strengthening experiences, well, what could you expect?

It’s no joke though, as now the little bastard has his fat, sweaty, trembling pork-sausage of a finger hovering just over the button that destroys the planet.

Well, what can you do? Stop and think. What can you do? I suppose you can do what you can. The trouble is, people don’t usually start moving until they are desperate, and not enough people are desperate enough – yet. In 1917 they were desperate enough in Russia to overthrow the Czar and create a new type of society. OK, it got fucked up by the Bolsheviks almost immediately and turned into a vile dictatorship of the inner party, but that’s another story. Revolutions frequently go horribly wrong, but that does not necessarily justify the existence of the previous regime.

Every single right we have was acquired by people demanding those rights from a position of strength. You cannot demand your rights from a position of weakness. Parliament, Votes for Commoners, Worker’s Rights, Votes for Women, Civil Rights, Animal Rights, Gay Rights, Legal Marijuana – you name it – they’ve all been achieved through struggle and sacrifice, in short, through activism.

Of course, there was a lot of activism in the sixties. Maybe the mind-expanding drugs had something to do with it – and of course, there was so much to be active about. It was an ultra-politicised decade, but also a super-cultural decade, a veritable renaissance, which saw it’s great flowering in 1967, the Summer of Love. Even as a small child I knew something was up.

So look – it’s the 100^th anniversary of the October Revolution and the 50^th anniversary of the Summer of Love – wouldn’t the obvious thing be to combine 1917’s zeal for social reform with 1967’s outpouring of transcendental love in 2017?

Anyone got any better ideas?