From Dreaming to Doing.

In this age when computers have made it so easy to churn words out, we are suffering from a veritable blizzard of them. Many of them actually do more to obscure our vision than to enlighten us. To have the opportunity to do more than give them a cursory glance is something of a luxury; serious, joined-up thinking, and the listening and reading that might go with it and which might be expected of anyone exercising any serious judgement, is rare indeed. We all tend to fall back on glancing at our usual sources, rather than trying to wrestle with the very disparate voices that sometimes crop up very near to us, even within us.

Most people allow dodgy press barons or others with murky agendas to tell them what to think, even as they delude themselves that they are thinking for themselves. Hence my extreme distrust of this rule by plebiscite that has somehow crept into politics in some places lately. What kind of democracy is it, as proposed both by Mrs May and Mr Corbyn, which ignoring all precedent, sets up the result of a thoroughly bad and largely dishonest public debate as an immutable decision, which may not be revisited after two roiling years and billions of words have at least surely nudged quite a significant number of people into trying a spot of thinking for themselves and of seriously imagining the kind of a world which they are going to pass on? Still they are not being offered a coherent vision, nor even a viable concept, of where they are being led to. 

However, with the genie out of the bottle, for all its divisive and unsatisfactory nature, it seems that we shall have to go with this type of politics, and that the only hope must be to make the debates more informed and genuinely free. It is encouraging to see young people get stuck into efforts such as:  https://www.wewantthefinalsay.com/ . We can only expect to turn the corner into a more hopeful world when, not content with dispensing more and more words, we find ways of acting them out in positive ways, in our way of living.

This is easier said than done, of course. Practical types rightly tend to be suspicious of idealists, even of ideas and ideals themselves, and actually 'putting one's money where one's mouth is' is a dangerous business. It is not in fact something that one can do from mere intellectual conviction, or as a result of a simple decision. Let us say there has to be an element of serendipity, or if you prefer, plain old luck; and also realise we shall have to overcome a lot of scepticism with patience. It is one thing to deplore cynicism, and another to convince people of viable alternatives. In fact the only way to do so is to demonstrate them, and I suppose it is really only in relation to attempts to do so that the spouting of yet more words by people like me is acceptable.

I wish it had happened twenty years ago, but better late than never I am really enjoying at present the sense of 'firing on all cylinders'. This is surely what a creative and healthy culture bestows on its fortunate children, when the spiritual and physical, the idealist and practical, the social and personal dimensions of life start working together instead of being at odds. The media of our lives, in which term I very much include the means by which for example we get around and power our technology, are indeed the massage. I am showing my age perhaps with this reference to Marshall Mcluhan, but anyway, I want to make the old Anna M into one powerful little messenger with which to massage the folk of the Gannetsway. Away with the separately firing cylinders and struggling to get them to work together; let's get into the Electric Age!  

'Anna M' learning from dolphins that autonomy with solidarity equals freedom.