Beautiful Burnout

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The following was found and forwarded from 'The Guardian' website as a comment on a thread (about 15 comments down) from a contributor called 'Beautiful Burnout'. Excellent and quite moving.


The cuts will have little or no direct effect on me, personally.

I have benefited from the reduced interest rates on my mortgage subsequent to the banking rip-off. I am in a profession where work will never run out. OK, my work-related overheads have gone up by an average of about 25% over the last year and I have to work harder to stand still, as it were, but I am not on the breadline.

Yet yesterday I walked more than 3 miles with half a million others because every benefit I have had from the welfare state - free schooling, virtually free higher education, health-care free at the point of delivery (and instantly available no matter whether I have the right insurance or not), a fire-brigade or ambulance service that will turn up to my house in reasonable time should I require it, a police service that will protect me, etc. etc.- is going to be denied to the next generation for....well, what reason exactly?

So that:
1) Right-wing ideologues can open up all those markets that the US have been whining to the WTO about for decades.
2) Some ideological principle can be applied that says people should contribute less tax and pay privately for their services (screwing the collective community if they cannot afford to pay their insurance)
3) Further rewards can be showered on the very richest in society, while the very poorest will be expected to step up or die out
4) Any public provision will not be on the basis of the most needy, but on the basis of who those in control consider to be the most deserving.

In short, we will be regressing to a Victorian model society of the über-rich and undeserving poor.

The reason why the welfare state was created after WW2 - and may I remind people that this was a time when our national debt was somewhere in the region of 150% of our GDP - was because the war was a remarkable leveller of class. Suddenly all those rich officer types became aware that the working class ranks were good people, brave people, people just like them, prepared to put their lives on the line for them, and that these people deserved being treated with respect. They deserved a share in the country's wealth to the extent that they would no longer have to worry about what would happen to them if they fell ill or lost their jobs - after all, they had fought just as hard to protect the country they loved.

The reason why the current lot of right-wing assholes are managing to dismantle all this to their own benefit is because the have succeeded in dehumanising working class people again - portraying them as spongers, scroungers and profligate spendthrifts. Aided and abetted by mega-rich newspaper moguls and other allies, they deflect attention from the fact that their buddies in the City have royally shafted us all. Privatising their profits, nationalising their losses, they blame the very people who had replenished the Treasury coffers year-in year-out with their hard-earned cash. We are not supposed to consider the fact that those same coffers have been emptied into the pockets of the Fat Cat City spivs and crooks a relevant issue.

Yesterday was just the beginning of the backlash. My middle-aged feet are killing me, but I will march again and again until they are bruised and bleeding - not for me, but for everyone else.

Stick that in your corporatist crack pipes and smoke it.


....and along the same lines.... "Andrew Lansley. TOSSER!" from MC NxtGen.

Hurrah for youth. Well done young man.




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