I can’t hold back the tears and rage. I’m fearful of my Country and what it is becoming. The horrors we are witnessing when we look beyond the veil of the bought up media are terrifying. I’ve recently moved to one of those small towns where it looks like austerity isn’t happening at all, the streets are clean, there are no homeless to be seen and you would never know just how bad it has become. It feels like a Stepford town right now. So divorced from reality.
If you become terminally ill or disabled in the UK and ask
for financial assistance, you might be asked why you haven’t killed yourself yet? By the person you have to go to for
essential help. If you haven’t thought
about it yet, having your money sanctioned or stopped completely might get you
there. Because when you have no other
way of eating, and no other way of paying your rent and keeping a roof over
your head, you are going to some dark places indeed. I start with the disabled or terminally ill
because it is harder to dismiss than someone who’s simply jobless and desperate
for assistance. We’ve been brainwashed
into believing they are undeserving fraudsters, rather than your Dad’s mate
who’s worked for 40 years, paid into the system all his life and can’t find any
work, even a zero hour contract. When
someone with terminal cancer or a brain tumour is found fit for work and dies shortly after, it
demonstrates just how dysfunctional and unbelievably cruel our “social security”
systems are right now.
I don’t know her situation but one Woman wanted you to hear
how desperate she became this week, she set herself alight in Barnet Council Offices. Outsourced security measures that had been put in place because other desperate people had attempted suicide in those offices, failed. She's fighting for her life. I wonder how she got here? Was she ill or disabled unable to get
assistance? Did she have children she
couldn’t feed? Was she hungry and unable
to get food? Had she been scared
sleeping on the streets or was she facing that?
Was she was about to lose her home? She was clearly at breaking point.
The sad truth is we may never know, and the desperate reality is it
could be any of the above. In 2018, in
one of the richest countries in the world.
It wasn’t newsworthy apparently though, this statement she
made, the fire, the burning, the horror.
The Mainstream media was silent. If it wasn’t for independent media providers such as the Skwawkbox we’d
be none the wiser. Would we ever have
heard at all? She isn't the only person to set themselves on fire, to make someone listen as they struggled with the benefits system. Did you hear about Peter?
Peter, wanted humanity, because life is unbearable without
it. We all know this. We all at some level, no matter how
comfortable we are, know that we would never want anybody we love to be in this
position. We have to recognise that that care and empathy has to extend beyond our loved ones, because if it doesn’t they
may be next.
We owe it to these people to hear them. To recognise what this system has driven them to. The desperation they must have felt. Whatever their story, we as a society have let them down. A government that demonises empathy,
compassion and kindness has a hold over us we could never have imagined. Our government practices conscious cruelty
and it has to stop. We have to wake,
because enough people are so far in slumber that there is a risk, unbelievably,
that they will be voted in again.
