For Gaza

No matter how deep we bury ourselves, the bombs still find us. The very earth shakes with an intensity we have never felt before. Our innocence cannot protect us. Our hopes cannot shield us. Our love cannot keep us alive. Our beliefs will not keep us safe.

We thought if we could just hide down here, deep in the earth, we would be safe. But we find that safety is an illusion we carry in our hearts, a feint memory of a time when the bombs did not fall. Families are torn apart. Children are torn apart. Bodies are torn apart till we cannot recognise where the parts came from.

And above all, the sounds. First a whistling, closer, then a thump and a shudder and suddenly, silence, the noise so loud our ears cannot hear anymore. Crying is useless. Anger is useless. In our pain we are dumb and deaf and speechless, so we scream.

And still the bombs fall. Perhaps they are sent in hate and in anger. Or perhaps they are sent by someone who no longer cares about anything, someone who, if asked, might say, I'm just doing my job.

A beacon to all

In these uncertain times, when climate change is rushing toward us at the speed of a hurricane, when politics makes a shift to the right and all around are fundamentalists and crazy politicians with as much insight as your average fly, when resources are running out, when democracy reveals itself as the tool of the rich and voting the ritual abdication of our right to decision making, when hope itself appears foolish and not even innocent, anarchy stands as a beacon to all - the only credible hope for humanity.

Rooted in the dreams and desires of us all, whether we admit it or not, anarchy is the voice of reason, an appeal to our better natures, carrying the possibility of a decentralised and sustainable future built on love and respect.

The Spanish knew something of this in 1936 and the Zapatistas know it today.

Millions have known the same throughout history and millions still do.

The illusion of free choice is the free choice of illusions.

It is now an accepted, although much ignored, fact that the average citizen, in filling their car with petrol, is implicitly supporting corporate terrorism, oppression and violence, not to mention the systematic destruction of the very life support system we all reply on for our very existence. By purchasing a tee shirt from KMart of WalMart we are supporting the exploitation of labour in Asia, Africa or Central America, and the systematic destruction of our own industrial base and employment.

As the situationists declaimed in 1968, there are no more innocent people, believing so is not even a harmless affectation. Or as Prof. Singer has explained, choosing to drive your car is an ethical or moral choice, based on the belief that my own convenience is of more importance than all other considerations, more than the health of our shared environment or even of our children.

What are the conditions which create the industrialised consumer, free of conscience, ethics or politics? What form of ignorance is possible today in our over-informed societies? Is it possible to claim, 'I didn't know!", when information is so freely available, when a quick search of the internet can call up information on everything from civil rights to the exploitation of 'third world' labour?

Or do citizens choose tyranny simply because they could not be bothered doing otherwise? Or are we labouring under the tyranny of choice? Are there simply too many choices available, to the point where an informed choice is no longer possible? Is there too much information flooding our consciousness too actually discriminate between bullshit and truth?

Possibly, as our society, its TV, newspapers and airwaves, is flooded with lies, half-truths, deceptions and deliberate manipulation, it has become harder and harder to discriminate between truth and lies. Possibly we are losing our 'shit detector', something we have been able to rely on as an intrinsic part of human capability? You can't fool all the people all the time...?