It's time to make some Good Trouble

When politicians talk about a return to normal soon being here, it is like a promise made to children as they nod off to sleep that Never Never Land is on the horizon of their closed eyelids. Since 2020, leaders asked citizens to believe in fantasy over the reality of our dire situation caused by Covid and economic inequality between the classes. It's why governments dispensed with regulations requiring people wear masks in public indoor settings before it was prudent.

By doing so, governments bought us unlimited tickets to ride the Coronavirus wave rollercoaster for the foreseeable future. Any thinking person knows the reason why governments did this. They were told to or convinced to by the 1%, who feared masking up makes people less prone to purchase non-essential consumer goods, thus diminishing the profits of the entitled. Either by design, dumb greed or neoliberal serendipity, removing masks mandates early pushed public healthcare systems to the breaking point after years of underfunding. Public healthcare faced the pandemic head-on and survived. But it couldn't survive politicians listening to business interests before scientific realities.

In the UK, a seriously ill person can wait hours for paramedics to arrive on their doorstep to transport them to overcrowded, understaffed A&Es that are at the breaking point, in terms of human resources and morale. Yet, Boris Johnson has treated his last summer as PM as a last hurrah for personal jollies. At least when the Nazi regime was crumbling, there were some in Hitler’s circle, like Speer, that tried to prevent Germany's economic destruction because of the Fuhrer’s scorched earth policy. But when it comes to Boris Johnson's scorched earth Brexit plan for Britain, both he and his potential successors are on the same page. The Tories, with or without Johnson, will let the people rot like it was 1840 from a 21st-century cost of living crisis, energy crisis and environmental crisis.

If only it was just Britain that is on this highway to hell paved with the evil intentions of the 1%, it might be possible to survive as an ordinary person to old age. Sadly, the phenomenon is worldwide. That is a terrifying dilemma for us all because no ordinary citizen anywhere can expect to live out their lives in relative peace and economic stability.

Canada is in terrible shape socially and economically despite the well-to-do from that country trying to argue otherwise. In Toronto, their homeless shelters turn away over a hundred unhoused people each night because there are no beds. Personal bankruptcies are up over 15% across Canada and 26% in cities like Hamilton.

Before the pandemic, it was unthinkable for a Canadian premier to posit that the publicly funded healthcare system needs to be privatised to alleviate wait times for surgeries and shuttered emergency departments, without being pilloried by the press, and public or the Federal govt saying; “over our dead body.” But in the summer of 2022, talk of privatising Canada’s healthcare system is all the rage without the news media deeply questioning who profits from this and how it will end democracy in the country.

This summer is ending with a bang when Donald Trump's Florida house is raided for classified nuclear documents stolen by him. American society has become more than polarised; it is dangerously unhinged. The prospect of real violence is in the air like the smell of smoke from the uncontrolled wildfires burning across its country. But that threat of violence is in every country now. No nation is safe from hitting a tipping point like it was in 1789, 1917 or 1918 because the entitled are a class that has destabilised the smooth running of democracies by taking too much and putting not enough back into society.

What's ahead for ordinary people will be a hard path to walk. We live in a time of forever wars and forever pandemics. Our climate and environment are dying a raging death because we surrendered it for centuries to the billionaires who exploited and robbed it of its bounty for their well-being, not ours. We live in a dystopian time.

And the problem with living in a dystopian time is you can not expect current politicians or the news media to get us out of this marathon towards Armageddon because they brought us to where we are now.

The easy and good times are gone for us. They ain't coming back. So, we must become like the Greatest Generation and be collective, generous, courageous, and get to work to end the tyranny of the 1%. It will take more than hashtags, and feel-good Tic Toc videos to do it. It is going to take General Strikes, civil disobedience and as John Lewis said, "Get in good trouble," or else as a species; we are going to be extinct sooner rather than later.

Photo by Andrew Valdivia on Unsplash