The important thing now is to have a celebration and then with determination move into our common, shared, different future – M Higgins
The world is in appalling mess, multiple vital resources are either peaking or running out completely, due our extravagant and wasteful use of them and the illusion that they will some how last for ever. The methods we use to exploit and extract these resources are causing untold amounts of air, water and land pollution. The way we live and consume is also interfering with our weather systems and hugely contributing towards our climate changing, this is already having an effect on life on earth with the loss of habitat, the failure of agricultural crops, and the loss of diversity of flora and fauna. But the cherry on the icing of this miserable and depressing cake is the fact that our world leaders continue to promote this ongoing death of the planet through the Caveman type savagery of Neoliberalism where nothing is sacred and everything is a commodity, where no collectivism exists only solitary economic predators and individual workers.
Our fight back as a celebration of the possibility of a better world
Despite the fact that things are so very bad in the world, the human spirit, and the remaining communities of the world are gathering momentum, forging links, creating flashes of synergy by fighting back in creative, diverse and intelligent ways. So is this a cause for celebration then? Yes definitely, we are onto the greedy parasitic Neoliberals and their warped and twisted sense of human nature and their blithe disregard for human beings and everything else living on our planet. We have real and workable solutions that can bring about a fair and ecologically sound world where people are freed from the restraints of being locked into a financial system that enslaves them for five out of seven days a week. Though our task is so huge that we might fail, our solutions are so workable that stand a good chance of winning this battle, and it is a battle that we need to win.
Let’s Celebrate!
On an everyday level, we celebrate small victories everyday when we eat and drink things that we’ve grown, we celebrate not having the food driven and flown all over the planet before it gets to us, and we celebrate being able to eat food that hasn’t been sprayed with toxic chemicals. When we disagree with Neoliberal philosophies and practices and find our own ideas that are suited to people and planet, we celebrate our ability to say no and to fight back in the ways that we do, we also celebrate when we find others who think there is more to human existence than a manufactured separation from nature, where human existence consists of working yourself into the ground and collecting material possessions until we die of exhaustion and bitterness at not living that we wanted. I called this piece celebrating being human because the world we live in never acknowledges that we are human, in this world, we are workers, consumers, managers, service users and numbers. Celebrating being human is also about reclaiming who we are; we are not consumers, or national insurance numbers or crosses on Ballot boxes.
The future of celebration
Human cultures and communities have held celebrations as a central point of their yearly calendar for thousands of years, and it likely that this something we will always do past, present, and future. When we celebrate we do to acknowledge certain events in our cultural past, the optimist in me sees that we will be celebrating the fall of consumer Capitalism in the future and out transition to a better and fairer world. As we continue our fight against the seemingly unstoppable Neoliberal onslaught of people and planet, we should pause and share drink, food and music with those who share the fight with us; this will give us strength and resolve to continue.
Steve
Steve