impotence and protest

There is nothing more terrifying than impotence

To face the one you love, awkwardly

Your whole body screaming

Mind reeling from one hell to another

The one word that sums it all up: Why?

Why is this happening?

and Why can’t I do anything about it?

This is how it was after the Iraq war. For a lot of students who are now passing through university, this was their first experience of protesting. And what fun we had! Bottles of cider and charging around parliament square in our school uniforms. But ever since then, every day in the news we’ve had to face up to the fact that we failed. As a nation, we were at a crossroads. We knew what we were doing. If the British army kill people in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can only blame ourselves. Yes, you may say, but I’m an Anarchist, I fly no flag and I never expected anything less from the government. A compellingly cynical idea. But the fact remains; we could have stopped the war. We could have tried harder. We could have gone to Iraq to stand in front of tanks… We could have done a lot. This is why the feeling of impotence is so bound up with my feelings about 2003- it is not a matter of physical weakness, but of fear. We were too afraid to truly do what we had to do, and that fear manifested itself in death, torture, destitution- you all know how it is... The truly terrifying thing is not war, it’s our pretending to accept it as something beyond our control.

So where does that bring us to now? Well, we’re faced with the same situation, really. Those in power lie, smarm and swan around London, fucking everyone else over and expect nothing to come of it. Perhaps a little anger ‘vented’. I don’t know how anyone can look at the bad joke that is our political system, and then say with a straight face that it’s because of ‘apathy’ that we don’t go out to vote for these fucks. It’s no surprise that those that have grown up in my generation want to do more than just march quietly and go home. We’ve tasted defeat at an early age, and we won’t be fooled again. We all know that what the government is doing is wrong. But it’s not them we have to argue with.

What can we do about it?

We can do a lot.