One Final Summer Post

Tomorrow starts September. This has been a Summer when my eyes truly opened to the new media, and to the possibilities of escaping the way information is presented or controlled in this society. I note tonight that New Orleans is under threat of destruction; and that, on the other side of the world, two and a half million people have been displaced in India and half a million are trapped by floods as twenty Army columns are dropped from the sky to help. I also note that serious people are contemplating war in Iran, that East Africa is in famine, and that, in the absence of a credible Mediterranean organisation, Italy is playing power games with Libya.

That an internet screen can tell me this is hardly revolutionary. What I want to spend the next few months doing is working out how internet campaigns, agitprop, and the new, and somewhat conservative counterculture of blogland can warn us and save us, and perhaps comfort us in our near despair. Experiments in evolving systems of government into something more suited to the internet are going on all over the world.

They are, in my opinion, the alternative to a sort of soft fascism. This soft fascism would be aided by a media-political middle class that responded to over indebtedness and the behaviour of the super rich by capturing and strengthening the state and screwing workers. We would retreat into hysterical, anxious emptiness or ethnic and religious sodalities that made common citizenship and reason impossible. It is not the future I want. It is practically here.

If you live in one of the many areas of despair across the world, or within this country, or if your anger of sense of hopelessness is boiling over, I wish you my prayers and peace. As I do so, I contemplate Jesus Christ and his cross, but I make no sectarian point. We can both contemplate that in the space where freedom lives behind our eyes, as free souls, and in a spirit of respect.

Do not be eaten by your anger or give in to your despair. Empires fall, bad men and women often do well in a fallen world. The good are often unrewarded and unremarked. But love and reason, somehow, can save you and I, and maybe 'them' as well.

They are the only things that will, and from them all the other good things flow. Otherwise, we are, to mangle my poems, ants and weasels fighting in a hole until death or the ice or the fire come. I do not want to live in some eternal recurrence based on nothing but impulse and the exclusive moment, and nor should you.

Here is a song I linked to before, and like; 'The National' and How to Start A War. I hope that next summer, it won't be serving some sad reflection on what could have been. The picture at the top of this blog is of Donegal, which is one of the most beautiful places on Earth.