It's my party and I'll cry for revolution if I want to.

On being skint and turning 59 in a society that sent the bailiff's to evict the Welfare State

I am fifty-nine today, and despite my poverty, there will be cake. I have reasons, to celebrate, even if good fortune has not always been my closest acquaintance. I am alive, and that is fortunate enough for me. I have seen death come for me twice, and despite its determination to finish me off, my heart still beats. The first time death came for me, I was forty-two. At that age, a heart attack almost ended me; before I got to know myself. But I was lucky, and I survived my heart attack. While I recovered from my brush with death, I began to reexamine my life. I concluded my existence was made for more than consumerism, neoliberalism's factory default setting. I stopped lusting for middle-class respectability and began to grow as a human being. I became less sarcastic, more honest with myself and others and willing to forgive my weaknesses as well as the weaknesses of others.

Two years ago, death came for me, a second time when I was diagnosed with rectal cancer at fifty-seven. The diagnosis seemed very cruel because I was starting to like myself. I felt more relaxed in my own skin because I had spent the last ten years of my life caregiving for my father as well as doing some good in the world through his Harry’s Last Stand campaign. The thing is, with death, it doesn’t care if your dessert order hasn’t come yet to your table; if it wants you gone, you go.

Death wasn’t fucking around with me that time. It wanted me dead and as quickly as possible. My cancer was discovered after I could no longer ignore my symptoms that I at first just shrugged off as physical manifestations of grief for my recently dead father. But you can only take incessant diarrhoea, abdominal pain, and exhaustion for so long before you seek medical attention. A colonoscopy detected cancer just as the world slammed into the vortex of the covid pandemic.

For a while, I wasn’t sure if my epitaph would read dead from cancer or dead from the plague. But again, after much struggle, I was spared death. It was postponed, but not for as long as I would wish because it's the politics of today that will kill me rather than disease. My epitaph will read upon my demise, dead from penury because skirting death from cancer and covid has left me financially poorer for it. However, being alive and skint is better than being dead and buried with the riches of Tutankhamun.

Being poor makes you susceptible to the allure of populism. But I know I won't ever fall under the sway of fascism despite ticking many of the boxes that make me a prime candidate to dine at the all-you-can-eat buffet of hate served to white males of my demographic by America’s Republican Party, Britain’s Tory Party or Canada’s conservative party. There is no question; I am peeved that I don’t live as well as I’d like to or as well as I deserve. My intelligence, however, is sufficient to know the blame for my economic misfortunes isn’t the fault of the immigrant, women, refugees, people of other faiths, other colours or the Trans community. They are not to blame for my downfall or the many other people of my age group who were cheated by neoliberalism. The blame lies with a system that sustains an economy that profits the few and entrenches their entitlement with the same assurance that primogeniture for over a thousand years preserved the wealth and power of the aristocracy.

My enemies of promise and your enemies of promise are the 1% along with the top 15% of income earners who protect their benefactors by keeping people like us far from the gates of prosperity. It is by invitation only that one may ever enter that Kublai Khan pleasure dome of asset wealth. Once the bouncer unhooks the red velvet rope for you to go in; you are under their management and must accept never to alter the inequality that leaves so many out in the cold. Sure, vote Liberal, vote even left of liberal and give to food banks. But never call for radical change or you are going to be out on your arse.

Fascism is nefarious because it is the Iago of politics. It is an ideology that harnesses the anger, the legitimate acrimony of people deserted by our modern economic system and makes them turn against their brethren in suffering.

I have no religious beliefs, no faith in an afterlife or that the good will be rewarded for their deeds and the wicked punished. Life to me isn’t a crapshoot but a bent casino where your parents’ wealth and position in society will 99.9% of the time determine where you will end up in life. Born rich; you will die rich, and if you are born poor or disadvantaged; you will die poor and disadvantaged.

For a few decades, the casino of life in Western countries was made honest by the Welfare State, but the wealthy and the politicians who serve them said, “not having that.” So, that is why as I go into my 60th year of life, I don’t think I will live longer than another 10 years because there is no safety net for people like me, or you, or your children. The boomers sold civilisation down the river. They sold us all out for vacations in the sun on cheap credit, and a retirement funded by the overprice value of their homes because of a self-created housing bubble. Hope, however, has not deserted me. I know that we live in a world where the lights are going out, and it is unlikely that I will see them come back on in my lifetime. For all its capacity for evil, the human spirit has so much capacity for empathy. It has an abundant capacity to do good and to devise political and economic ideologies that benefit everyone. The forces of revolution are gathering strength. The young of this world know because of the climate emergency, their lives will be more difficult, less affluent and shorter in duration than their parents, and they are pissed off. From that anger, a revolution will be born that may finally get it right, unlike the revolutions of 1789, 1848, 1917 or 1968. On this birthday, I will have cake and wine to toast what is coming-a revolution. This revolution might finally build a world where everyone has the right to live a life of purpose and love, free of want and ill health.