There used to be a shop called Supertramp in Robertson Street (the second most shoppingy street in our town centre). It was gorgeous. I was a bright-eyed teen, eager to get to the independent-with-money-in-your-pocket stage of growing up. It was my persistent inner vision of shops like Supertramp, full of records and posters and books and stash tins and pottery and coloured boot laces and candles and dream-catchers and polished stone trinkets and badges and incense and twizzles of silver-wire accessories that kept the ambition alive.

When I’d got far enough down that road that I could afford to buy LPs, I bought Crime of the Century by Supertramp, (from Supertramp.) Never let it be said that money can’t make you happy. My room was increasingly like the interior of that shop, with candles and pottery, with colourful things hanging from the ceiling, and with Crime of the Century playing on the (oh joy!) record player I now had in my room.

There are degrees of awareness. Even back then, as a teen largely dedicated to fantasy and righteous nonsense, I had a nugget of protected awareness inside me (like most ASD kids, I went around knowing that I was very clever really, it’s just that I had to hide that, because I was so stupid – or some such convoluted working protocol).

I listened to Crime of the Century, my entire teenage frame vibrating with righteous ‘I told you so’ness. But at the same time, the tucked away bit of me that I protected from the world knew darned well that the me who was eagerly getting into a place where I had money in my pocket and could buy colourful things and LPs from Supertramp was TOTALLY what that song was about.

There are two things: the first one is that we lack a level of nurture and education that would prevent people becoming blind servants to the monster (you know, working for companies that kill, blindly voting for politicians that sound good on telly, trying to save yourself by buying cool music and trinkets); and the second one is that people who are seriously mistreated or badly nurtured are likely to become active monsters themselves, and have to be taken in hand if they aren’t to commit atrocities.

I think calmly knowing that and acting on it is the thing we’re seeking.

50 years on

Click here for a little Facebook vid about Gaza

I don’t know if there are degrees of awareness. I think there are degrees of mindfulness and resolve. We all flip flop around, doing the best we can some of the time – and not, the rest of the time. We need to forgive ourselves for that, because life’s a mass of pressures and distractions – but we need to keep trying. Last week, partner and I bought a few different products to avoid the BDS list – including buying Oral B instead of Colgate. It’s a memory test, this BDS stuff – Oral B is on that list too! Okay, next week I’ll take the BDS list shopping with me alongside the shopping list.

That’s all there is to it, isn’t it. How hard are we prepared to try? We know what’s wrong with the world. If we’ve thought much about it, we know how unlikely it is that any one person can save the world – we save the world by each of us doing our little bit, this action, that petition. This march, that conversation … vaguely aware that we need to ramp it up quite a lot, to inspire others to do a little bit; meanwhile, we need to develop the resolve to keep aware, keep watching, reading, researching, checking our facts and our beliefs, so that we know, clearly, that we all need to keep ramping it up, in the hope that eventually, the world will reach an average level of responsible behaviour that will tip us over into ‘humans do good’.

We need to speed that up, don’t we. As they all said in Ministry for the Future, do more!

Vietnam 2.0

Right now, our university students across the world are doing a fantastic job. I wonder, when push comes to shove, if I would stand in line and face a monster like the US police. I hope I would, because it will come to that, for all of us, sooner or later, unless we all get really good at doing our best really quickly.

Good luck, and let’s all keep pushing!

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Kay

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