This book is a wish for a moment of contemplation of our own insignificance and what we will leave behind to clear up. This is an action of silently calling and willing, a melancholic realisation of the power I do not have. Leading me to the politics of land and who holds the potential for change, who does not and how this might play out in the future.
It is a small request for a history to be recognised and a future to be remembered.
What will happen when children who need educational support can’t get it? What does their future hold? How will they access an education system that is for profit? How is it that there is no funding if you have a need? How will parents who do not have hundreds of pounds spare to get an assessment see how to best help them? If they do find out what help is there? When the school cannot pay for enough teaching assistants to enable these students, our children, where will their future be? When they become young adults and do not have the required qualifications to gain college placements or the jobs that they would like to strive to achieve, to enable their goals as they grow what will their future be? When they try, try and try but the system has NEVER supported them what will happen? Do we really believe, in this society, that they are not worth the effort and have nothing wonderful to contribute? This is now.
When profits are prioritised at the cost of everything else, when environmental practises ruin the world for your children's children and there is no way of pulling it back who will be accountable? When you could have banned plastics, toxic waste, fossil fuels and done everything in your power to protect our planet and you prioritised profits what did you do? When you could have enabled, when you could have cared for the vulnerable instead of passing over the problems and protecting the wealthy, giving contracts to failing business, cutting funding for local government, social care, learning and education, failing to enable the future to even exist in an optimistic way what then? This is now.
When all of our children are having children and striving, will only the rich be able to afford to be in a hospital with a maternity ward that is not overcrowded and understaffed? When the funding completely dries up and my daughter cannot afford health insurance because of her employment situation and my mother has died in a draughty A&E corridor who will be accountable? When there is no social care and our family assets are gone to pay for it and there is nothing left for our children who never had a chance at a home anyway, who will be accountable? This is soon.
When higher education becomes inaccessible because of debt that can and will never be repaid what then? When we do not have philosophers and artists, when our society is less rich and more hopeless what then? When you have destroyed a culture of voices and crushed the hope out of us what then? When we the people realise you stopped listening and didn’t care for us and the future of our children what then? By then it will be too late.
But, it will not be your mother, because you are privileged, it will not be your daughter, because she is privileged. It will ,however, be your grand children because they will suffocate alongside mine.
