Eleanor Rigby's Lament

As the Chancellor dines with business bigwigs and mandarins, at a £400/head function, I am left wondering how different our worlds are.

How can anyone fail to notice the cracks in our society? The streets are like a warzone now; there's bodies littered all over the place. These were real people once, they still are despite what austerity and capitalism has done to them. Yet, despite their increasing presence, they are growing ever more invisible. I've never seen anything like it.

And yet everywhere I go there is damage and suffering. I attend a mindfulness class with people that also have the scars of a life forced upon them by this miserable system. People like this are everywhere that it seems the norm. It's only the rich ruling elite that seem to be the exception. Unfortunately they have power; the power to ignore us.

I have a facebook and twitter feed full of the casualties of this war on humanity, waged by profit. At what point does enough become enough - for all sides? We can't take anymore, and surely they can't make anymore. We are destroying the planet and in the process losing ground in our own lives. I have never seen anything like it.

What will future generations say about this? How long will it take for the scars of this strange and miserable period to heal? There is so much pain everywhere and nobody has any answers. It becomes a part of you that you have to wear like a heavy winter coat. People are smothered in fog and the grey clouds of opportunity stolen, all to save people who have the most a tiny bit more. Ours is a world where the most popular form of banking is the kind that feeds people - where supermarkets are proud to collect donations from other people but not themselves. Yet this isn't even real food; it's sub-bully beef ration book crap that the desperate must feel gratitude for. I'm not criticising foodbanks, by the way, but the quality of fare certainly isn't healthy - tinned muck, sugar, empty carbs. That would kill me! But what else can these people offer? Good people who have to prop up society on the basis of dietary advice sponsored by biased big sugar! There's no respite for anyone.

And yet these people are lionised in the media. Are we so broken that we continue to buy into the rubbish spewed by the press. Today's Daily Mirror headline cast shame on Wayne Rooney, an overpaid ball kicker, for falling from grace such that he had to work in a garden centre. What does that say about people who do that as a genuine job? Is this the same press that speaks of the unemployed as being ungrateful for not accepting such work?

These are the end times - for something.

Something is dying and it's taking a part of each of us with it. Hopefully there will come an end to this, but it won't be without a fight. The problem is most of us are beaten down and punch drunk. The strength isn't there when you have to fight conditionality laid down by government departments who wield bureaucracy as a weapon clothed in a notion of support. This has to end. It has to die.