2000???
Index | Homepage | Good Links | Bad Links
Bill Hicks - died in 1994 of pancreatic cancer- aged 32 - just as he was awarded his own network TV comedy show vids and cd's distributed by rykodisc.com
2000???
.....yes and we certainly live in interesting times. Here I am, putting my feet up for a minute, still doing my thing of trying to figure out why the world's in such a mess and how to sort it all out.
The millennium bug's got me now. I keep hearing about how the army is preparing to come onto the streets and all government, police, and other establishment 'services' have had their leave cancelled. The banks won't sign Action 2000 so we could have dead cashpoints all over Britain? It is becoming difficult to draw the line between paranoia and complacency. What with all the lies about in the corporate media, maybe more difficult than ever before......?
One thing's for sure, 'civilisation' could be organised a hell of a lot more fairly than it is now. Economics is the new pseudo-religion, the priority for everything. What about people! How much do they pay them to keep broadcasting that?
But people are active - a bunch of people back in Christmas 1976 swamped microwave transmissions to a TV broadcasting tower and Britain had its first pirate Television. There is so much we can do to be heard. Do what you know needs doing, no matter what some jumped up thug tells you.
Mystery Babylon (probably the USA) is on the up. I'd like to think it's possible to make a better world but this one seems to be on the way out. The end's predicted in detail in the Bible but the established churches distract us from the best bits. I once asked a conventional priest what Revelation is about, "Well nobody understands that!" he replied.
The desire of traders to acquire wealth down the years has turned into greed of horrific proportions. Bankers, bosses of Transnational Corporations and media tycoons at the top of the pyramid wash their hands of responsibility for the deaths of millions of innocent people across the world. "You want to change things...", they say, "get the politicians to do it!" Bullshit! Fraud! They pay and arm the politicians to do the opposite, to rob the needy and concentrate even more wealth in the hands of the rich. Its obscene. The politicians may be ours one day every five years, but they're in the clutches of the super-rich for the other 1,824! That gives the people no say at all.
In the forties and fifties they invented a weapon that could wipe out mankind, if not life on our earth. The hydrogen bomb meant that if wealth was to be acquired it would have to be done stealthily and without upsetting governments. Thus big business around the world came together to form networks of influence with virtually limitless resources that transcended national boundaries and they began the final moves towards privatising the Earth. The Earth is, as Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers knew: '...a common treasury for all...' but its been gradually acquired as the private property of the super-rich land-lords. No doubt, if there is a God, this is not quite how he intended it to work!
Thank goodness we can do at least two powerful things. As you might have noticed we have been conditioned to believe that our contribution is insignificant. The mainstream media has become lifeless because the most sensitive and caring contributers are edited out. The arts have been taken over by advertisers who want to simply use them to make money. We all want rewarding work because our time is all we have in this life and that precious time is supposed to be taken up working for someone else!
The 'joys' of prostituting ourselves to top-down business structures are crumbling around us. Low wages, short term contracts, doubts about social security/welfare, casual labour, all of these trends make working for hire incrementally less attractive. But its not easy to get out of the system since our fundamental rights and needs, especially for land, have been stripped away. The government even extorts money from employees so that just about everything you do is, at least in part, working for the state. And feeding the whims of the rich.
The 'democratic' governments of the world have become little more than a perverted mishmash of Public Relations and Protection Racket!
Anyway... back to what we can do about it.
First we can refuse to compromise, that means refusing to
swallowing lies. I feel better already. We can all help tell the
sad and sorry tale of the corrupt system.
Exodus Collective Free Party Sound System and Housing Co-op at The Farm,
Luton, Beds.
People concious of the Christian message - defending themselves
from Babylon.
So - we can all shine the spotlight into murky corners where the elites would rather we didn't. Let the world see what they are up to and see how they are taking us all for a ride, parasites living off of our sweat and our resources. Secondly, like The Exodus Collective we can turn our backs on their rotten hierarchical system of haves and have nots. "Oh poverty has always been there and it is a natural part of life that there will be winners and losers", we hear them say... but its getting worse for us at the bottom at one hell of a rate and that's the old law of the jungle, we want to live in a civilised society and we've reached the point where we can reject 'laws' of competition and selfishness in favour of laws of co-operation and collectivism.
Mark Purdey won a high court case when he refused to use the poison. Good on him! Since the mid-eighties he has been courageously gathering evidence of agribusiness covering up the truth to avoid paying the billions in compensation to the farmers and the dead and brain-damaged public. He's at High Barn Farm, Elsworthy, Taunton, Somerset TA4 3PX, UK. Tel: 01984 56104. One Mark Purdey information link http://www.gn.apc.org/inquirer/madcow-update1.html
Anyway, the second thing is to turn away from the dying system and to start making our own spaces, like the one above at Tinker's Bubble. Jon is on the left and Tiff is peering out of the window of a wooden framed, two floor canvas house. Part of a low impact settlement.
In places like this we can work not for hire but voluntarily for what we want. We can agree our own rules and continue the process of coming together, organising in new ways of living. Treading lightly on the earth, not seeing it simply as a resource to plunder.
We can get ourselves organised by meeting up with people of a similar mind via, for instance the ecovillage network, and take pride in being regarded as 'serious criminals' according to the UK's latest bit of fascist legislation, the Police Act 1997, because we dare participate in '...conduct by a number of persons in pursuit of a common purpose...'
By doing so we risk our homes and solicitors offices being bugged by the police and MI5 and our houses being searched, without a warrant. Under the act intelligence information on us can now be sold or 'exchanged for gifts of property' to any business the police think could make good use of it. Legalised bribery.
The Criminal Justice Act 1995. This is the Criminal Act of Parliament that gives the police power without responsibility. And makes travellers, ravers etc. virtually illegal. It was as if suddenly Britain was not a free country any more. It was illegal to be different, the beginning of fascism and the police state. It's what made me decide 'enough is enough'.
your affectionate and faithfull friend,
Tony Gosling
Far spread the moorey ground a level scene
Bespread with rush and one eternal green
That never felt the rage of blundering plough
Though centurys wreathed spring's blossoms on its brow
Still meeting plains that stretched them far away
In uncheckt shadows of green brown, and grey
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky
One mighty flat undwarfed by bush and tree
Spread its faint shadow of immensity
And lost itself, which seemed to eke its bounds
In the blue mist the horizon's edge surrounds
Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours
Free as spring clouds and wild as summer flowers
Is faded all - a hope that blossomed free,
And hath been once, no more shall ever be
Inclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour's rights and left the poor a slave
And memory's pride ere want to wealth did bow
Is both the shadow and the substance now
The sheep and cows were free to range as then
Where change might prompt nor felt the bonds of men
Cows went and came, with evening morn and night,
To the wild pasture as their common right
And sheep, unfolded with the rising sun
Heard the swains shout and felt their freedom won
Tracked the red fallow field and heath and plain
Then met the brook and drank and roamed again
The brook that dribbled on as clear as glass
Beneath the roots they hid among the grass
While the glad shepherd traced their tracks along
Free as the lark and happy as her song
But now all's fled and flats of many a dye
That seemed to lengthen with the following eye
Moors, loosing from the sight, far, smooth, and blea
Where swopt the plover in its pleasure free
Are vanished now with commons wild and gay
As poet's visions of life's early day
Mulberry-bushes where the boy would run
To fill his hands with fruit are grubbed and done
And hedgrow-briars - flower-lovers overjoyed
Came and got flower-pots - these are all destroyed
And sky-bound mores in mangled garbs are left
Like mighty giants of their limbs bereft
Fence now meets fence in owners' little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease
Each little path that led its pleasant way
As sweet as morning leading night astray
Where little flowers bloomed round a varied host
That travel felt delighted to be lost
Nor grudged the steps that he had ta-en as vain
When right roads traced his journeys and again -
Nay, on a broken tree he'd sit awhile
To see the mores and fields and meadows smile
Sometimes with cowslaps smothered - then all white
With daiseys - then the summer's splendid sight
Of cornfields crimson o'er the headache bloomd
Like splendid armys for the battle plumed
He gazed upon them with wild fancy's eye
As fallen landscapes from an evening sky
These paths are stopt - the rude philistine's thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
But paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice 'no road here'
And on the tree with ivy overhung
The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung
As tho' the very birds should learn to know
When they go there they must no further go
Thus, with the poor, scared freedom bade goodbye
And much they feel it in the smothered sigh
And birds and trees and flowers without a name
All sighed when lawless law's enclosure came
And dreams of plunder in such rebel schemes
Have found too truly that they were but dreams.
John Clare 1793-1864
Tony Gosling
14 Lancaster Road
St. Werburghs
Bristol
BS2
England
Telephone +44 (0)117 955 6769
tony@gaia.org - put 'confirm' in the subject box and I will (guess what) confirm reciept of message
'First they came for the communists
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a communist
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a trade unionist
Next they came for the Catholics
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a Catholic
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.'
Pastor Niemoeller, Jewish victim of the Nazis
The first victims of Nazi purges were gypsies and travellers.(T)
To Tony's total index zone containing lists of everything