Darkness is coming both seasonally and politically.
The motto for October 2022 should be, "I've seen better days." It is a threadbare month that has more endings than beginnings. In our hemisphere, nature prepares to slumber under November snows, waiting to be reborn in spring. Covid, the war in Ukraine or the cost-of-living crisis; however, aren’t in the mood for sleeping. They grind on with the resolve of a woodchipper to reduce civilisation into dust. I think they might win against people like you and me because we have no one left in our corner. Governments aren’t trying hard enough to end them because profits of the 1% take priority over society, human life, and the right to a dignified existence. It's not that they are actively seeking the destruction of humanity. They are just gormless in the face of taking risks that might end their merry-go-round existence because, as a Canadian politician once said. "I am entitled to my entitlements."
Mainstream journalists and pundits are no different because if they aren't in the 1% now, their ambition is to join their ranks soon enough. Guardian opinion writers on contract are probably the worst offenders of pretending to want real change in the society we inhabit. They are status quo enablers because their job is to give hope that reasonable solutions are possible under our current system of government and economy. Their essays are like primal rage therapy in a controlled setting. They want you to break the prop vases, not the real vases. The intent of Guardian essays is to keep you believing change is happening, despite not having the same privileges as the contract essayists.
When my dad was finally discovered by the entitled in the journalism world, there was talk of a Guardian opinion contract which he quickly dismissed because; “once you are on the payroll, you will always bend to your master.”
It's not hope I distrust in October but optimism that things can get better before we bottom out as a society. Maybe, it's because I feel bottomed out as if I was resting on the sea floor, like a damaged submarine with no ballast left to jettison to make a safe ascent to the surface. This month weighs me down with too many memories. There is the death of Peter, my brother, 13 years ago on the 18th, my birth 59 years ago on the 22nd or the birth of my mother, 94 years ago in Weimar Germany to a single mother and a socialist gadfly for a father, on the 20th.
One thing is for sure, I get this thoughtful melancholy from my mother. She suffered not from depression but the angst of living through the terrible times of Nazism. She was a woman of great joy and passion, but her soul was autumnal in its glow. Were she alive, my mum would have not done well emotionally with Europe at war again. My mum hated the Nazis, but she also hated people who had never been touched by any war that believed armed conflict was something glorious or the only way to preserve democracy. She had seen too much death when young and witnessed her country embrace evil to not understand that barbarity waits for all nations to be unleashed by demagogues when inequality and hunger roam the streets like wild dogs. That knowledge left a signature of sadness in her thinking. But it also gave her wisdom about how to live life. My mother never trusted people who believed in moral absolutes because her life, like all of ours, was nuanced, much like a Turner painting.
Within the smudges of this existence, we all have much to ponder as darkness begins to set around us, and the world is in a funk. But after all the thinking is done it’s best to throw up a two finger gesture to the night that has fallen and stand your ground against it for as long as you can.
