—- She protests, exhausted, she wears these outrageous costumes
I want social change and I want it now. I want a complete restructuring of society. I want a society that cares about everyone. I want the rich to help the poor I want equality. I want the homeless to be housed. I want affordable housing. I want opportunities to be based on merit and not privilege. I want free education. I want all children to have a future. I want an NHS that is supported & not in tatters. I want the government that looks after the environment, & doesnt poison our land & water for profit. I want white men in suits to stop fucking it up for everyone. I want equal representation in government. I want to stay in the European Union. I want free movement of people. I want the world to care about the refugee crisis. I want to feel like we have a future. I want hope. I want to put concrete in our precarity and stabilise it I want to put helium in our dreams and let them fly. I want a complete rising up. I want to cast a spell against the madness. I want magic. I want rage. I want us to feel I want us to listen I want us to shift time. I want us to dance I want us to sing I want us to cry I want us to love big and hard. I want medals for everyone othered, every loser, fuckup, queer, good-fer-nothing, outcast, no-one. I want to smash fascism – I want to weed it out of our society with a toothpick.
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How are we gonna fix this mess we’re in? This is kind of about everything all at once. It’s hard to place your finger on one thing right now. I feel like Margate is this weird island of its own where noone talks about reality, maybe because most people have just moved here for the cheap beach-side property and the gourmet coffee and the boutique vintage, the general store selling £10 broccoli opening in one of the most deprived wards of the UK- all the home-comforts of the gentrified london highstreet at your doorstep. Maybe its because we live in an increasingly individualist society, and people will ignore all the social issues or just think wow isnt that interesting, isnt that real – //// I wanna get real now. The tory government has been investigated by the UN for the levels of poverty in the UK, there are more homeless people now than ever. Everything is being dismantled underneath our feet. It slips in, its insidious. The people at the ‘bottom’ of society are the first to have things taken from them because they have got noone to shout for them, theres not as far to fall, right. With Theresa Mays new brexit deal UK households are set to lose £1000 per yr. What happens to the people whove got nothing, the starving, the barely getting it together. Tbh i think thats more of us than u would think, living precariously, balancing on the edge of ‘im alright’ and ‘im falling’. Ive been writing/ thinking/ sad about this for fucking years but its just getting worse, its been 8 years of Tory rule – in that entire time we have seen the dismantling of the benefits system and people have slipped further and further into poverty, whilst we are distracted by the smoke-screen of brexit. It is rule, because yeah we live in an oligarchy, slowly becoming a police state.
The homeless shelter opened its doors last week and i went to help out on the weekend. By help out, the instructions given were to love everyone as if theyre friends coming round your house for dinner. I am down with loving everyone, thats why im there right. It was all at once heartbreaking & heartwarming, but I realised after leaving the first night completely emotionally drained – i’m really naive. As amazing and VITAL a service the shelter provides, its a complete travesty that the organisations set up to help them are propped up by the goodwill of untrained volunteers. Not because I want to be paid, but that the homeless people deserve to be met with trained support staff -I am a semi-experienced volunteer and i want to help! but as a 25 yr old woman I also need training to be put in a situation where ur supposed to be providing unconditional love to a group of mostly male, vulnerable adults. Do you know what I mean? Why is the government not providing this support??? Why is anyone being put in this situation???? – its a complete travesty that anyone in the UK is homeless, that the support is not there when they need it. I cant stop dreaming about these people now & it breaks my heart. Just the utter hopelessness because what is there? This one man was saying he must have done something bad in a past life because he certaintly hasnt in this one, bad luck can befall anyone, and a society is the measure of how it treats the weakest, and this society is broken. We all need to do a bit more dreaming, but more importantly we all need to stop being silent
