Despair rather than hope is in the hearts of many during the Christmas and Holiday season, in 2024. It's been a year of unrelenting economic brutality in our home countries because of a cost of living crisis created by the 1%. Housing this year became even more unaffordable to many citizens, and the cost of nutritious food is beyond the pocketbooks of so many people malnutrition has returned to our cities and towns, limiting life expectancy.
It's doubtful there is a peaceful way out of this cul de sac neoliberalism pushed us into. But if there is, it will be done by remembering our working class history honestly, without interpretation and reinvention from the entitled, who dictate the ebb and flow of even popular culture. We can use our past to reinvent our future to be for the many rather than the few.
On an audio tape, Harry Leslie Smith recalled Christmas in 1930 when he was seven years old and working-class Britain struggled through a harsh Great Depression famine. My dad's words are redemptive and contemporary considering how many bairns in 2024 will undergo a similar Christmas, thanks to a cost of living crisis created to better the profit of the 1%.
Harry Leslie Smith was an ordinary man who lived through extraordinary times. He was born during an era when the working class lived in destitution, and the entitled classes lived lives of excess and narcissism. His life's journey was a voyage most of his working-class generation undertook through the Badlands of poverty and war. But the sacrifices they made in their youth weren't in vain- from those struggles, my father's generation created the Welfare State.
Before Harry Leslie Smith died in November 2018, he dedicated the last decade of his life to not making his past our future by writing books, making speeches, and undertaking exhaustive speaking tours. His last project, The Green and Pleasant Land, was unfinished at the time of his death.
It’s a working-class Remembrance of Things Past as well as a political testament about democracy's need for a Welfare State. I've been piecing it together from all the written notes, typescript & index cards my father left behind. It is almost ready for publication. But until then, I will be providing excerpts from that work and my essays about the times we live in.
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