Fighting the great depression (we’re all in this together)

It feels like gravity has finally won. The wall paper of your mind is nicotine stained yellowing flock and is no longer available in the shops. In the grip of inertia the outwards is dragged inwards and eventually downwards towards your chipped sideboards and patchy brown carpet. Leaving behind the intertia wall paper, the pizza crust crumbs, and fag butt – coffee cup – gloop, you venture outside… but you are segregated. Separated by an invisible film and trapped in a salt water bubble you cant really be present –  and are somehow always there, never here. The magic of a trillion pinball variables is nowhere to be found and X is no longer  = Y + 3 – Z+ 4.7231,  X=X…at best. Inertia’s trick is to keep you looking backwards and life has, once again, become a visit to a museum. A beige coated janitor shuffles along a dust blanket dim corridor. Portions of micro history from his decaying life, are layed out in single file. Behind a dulled translucent glass are the exhibits…

item 234.56 “The time we called in sick and  made love until there was nothing left”,

item 4567.23 “another attempt to fuse two separate souls”,

item 234.5 “The dancing light on the Thames”,

item 678.99 2 “The greatest Joke I’ve ever told”

You dust off another exhibit, and no matter how hard you try you can only vaguely make out the form behind the thick glass.  There is one trick that the museum of life has to offer the depressed visitor. Good exhibits are almost impossible to see. They are badly catalogued and poorly mounted. All you can really see is the proud techni-colour gristle of your failings.

item 897.34 “A brass rubbing of an awkward silence”

item 931.35 “letting your girlfriend down”

item 1051 “all the things you never said”

Ultimately, the exhibition makes you feel powerless. Depression’s illusion is to make you think that the exhibition is life. It is not. Life is the 4D sprawl that fizzes and pops outside the museum exit. Outside the museum, life still twists and turns with never-ending variety and if you look closely enough everything is different.

Unfortunately, one of our greatest strengths – our ability to adapt – can lead us into trouble. As easily as you can get used to the temperature of a room, the cloying sense of damp or the existence of Jeremy Clarkson,  you can segue into an entirely different psychological continent without even realising you’ve left your front room. Melancholy does not always hit you in an ‘all at once’ cinematic crush, sometimes its takes days, weeks, years even to realise things have changed. I believe that’s what’s true for us individually also can be observed of us collectively. We often hear or say phrases like “you don’t need more than that do you?”,  ”its the simple things that are the most important”, “you’ve just got to make the best of it haven’t you” but I’ve come to think that, as valid as these are, they are the ‘Positive Mental Attitude’ of a battery chicken. Once we were free range. Now we are battery. However, as I write this more, and more people across the world are waking up.

 In much of the criticism of the ‘occupy movement’ there is an implicit phallacy that is constantly alluded to. Although its never been published, many people seem to have read:  ’How to successfully overturn a global hegemony and create utopia in one blinding flash of revolutionary glory – for dummies‘. Apparently, the history of revolutions is one of carefully thought out diamond-cut-crystalline logical 10 point plans. Apparently a small band of people with amazing FSU skills, (like the A-Team), can single handedly overturn an infinitely complex web of interdependent financial collusion.

Broken windows can be repaired, marches can be stopped, people can be arrested but ideas are invincible, and this is what ‘They’ are afraid of. I believe in violent and non-violent, direct, and indirect action. I believe in activism. I believe in tents. I believe in general assemblies. I believe in all of these things because their existence causes people to think differently. Entering into a depression is as simple as thinking differently. Escaping from depression is as simple as thinking differently. The #occupy movement is beginning to cause people to think differently and is infiltrating the mainstream media. When anti-capitalism is being discussed on ‘The One Show’, I think we’re heading in the right direction. The combination of sanitized and non- sanitized  protest is as powerful a combiniation as we need. Every tent at #occupyLSX will give  the inevitable images of the Nov 9th a context that may provoke, and not deter, more thought.

WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

The economy is slipping into a depression, and we are coming out of one.

#occupyLSX #occupyfs #ows #occupy #nov9 #nov30