A New Year at the barricades.

2021 has called last orders. But, I am wary of leaving this wretched year behind and going outside to meet 2022. It is not that these last 365 days were great for me. In fact, they were rather shit. And, I suspect for most of you, they were also shit. It is just that I feel 2022 will be much like 2021 but worse. You see my optimism for better days has worn as thin as a bar of soap that has been too long in a bathtub. I have also grown accustomed to the angst that this year brought. So, I am reluctant to experience new sensations of disappointment with our society that is hellbent on extinguishing itself through consumerism, political indifference, and a denial that our way of life creates suffering for two-thirds of the planet’s population. Yet I will still greet the New Year with defiance and good humour. I may be cynical but I am not bereft of hope that the best in humanity will triumph against the malicious impulses of the entitled. But, my dad's teachings taught me that our struggle to build a society where all benefit is a conflict where victory will be a long time coming. We cannot deny it as a society; we are now in a period of darkness. Over the past decade, democracy was co-opted by the wealthy and now mostly serves their interests. Intolerance, especially against refugees is as horrific today as during the rise of fascism in the 1930s. In 2022 and in the years to come, the vulnerable, the poor, the marginalised will endure unimaginable cruelties thanks to right-wing politics and their followers. But as long as we continue to fight according to our means to make a difference, it will pass.

Covid 19 irrevocably changed our confidence in society to take care of us and protect us when times are tough. It has made the ordinary worker aware that to the wealthy, their existence is treated with less concern than a farmer treated a beast of burden, in ancient times. This pandemic has made us live through a phenomenon that was as close to war as the western world has seen since 1945. It scared our psychology and left too many frightened, confused and in a state of general anger. We need to take that disquieted energy and harness it to build a better world post-Covid 19. At the start of the Second World, Britain's working class did just that by demanding that if their government wanted their blood, sweat and tears to beat Hitler then when victory came from the spoils of victory, a Welfare State was to be born. Today’s struggling ordinary workers must do the same. We must mobilise, unify, and use our power as a unit of labour and consumerism to demand a better life be created from the funeral pyre of an extinguished pandemic. It won’t be easy, and there will be much resistance from the 1%, the news media and anyone who profits from this current age of inequality. My dad and his generation taught me that life is a struggle. So, to survive it all, we must keep our sense of humour, never lose our humanity for others, learn to love and be loved and never give up the fight.

But to steel my nerves, for what is coming, I will drink wine before the hours leading up to the stroke of midnight. Then I will sing, like it were the International, Auld Lang Syne to an empty apartment that looks out onto a deserted street. Comrades; I will see you at the barricades in 2022. Happy New Year, John.