Start with me, me, me, why don't we? What's happening with me after this huge setback? Well, for one thing I'm aware as I type that I'm now using the word "we". A few months back I tapped out a few blogs about my politics and I am reminded in reading them now that my "I" has become a "we". It strikes me that that is no loss. I am still feeling a belonging to and a membership of something bigger than me. For me and others who have experienced it, that transformation, still in such early, fragile days, is such a beautiful, hopeful wondrous thing. I became we.
It's clear a week on from the No vote that we don't yet know our next steps and that we're disappointed, hurt and even angry. Too right we are, and much more besides. We're allowed to be mixed up and pissed off for heaven's sakes, and yet from the usual sources I hear the usual voices and their encouragements to move on, put behind, mend and pretend we've not changed after our brief dalliance with silliness. I'm not feeling it. Sorry, we're not feeling it. We're feeling lots of things but let's just feel them and not be rushed away from the emotions. There's no shame in them, to recover and be healthy we need to address our thoughts and feelings, not supplant them with someone else's poor advice. Our independence hangover and its pains mean it's not just some fleeting want that we all shared like a passing fad. We're bruised and sore because we really believed and haven't stopped doing so. We seem awful serious about this, whatever this is. We seem to not be done with it and that alone feels hopeful.
It looks for all the world that we are indeed "we" and that we intend to remain so because we have unfinished business. It's not just some poorly defined business either, our unfinished business is the bedrock of what we want our lives (and our kids lives) to become. Such matters were once the business of political parties and the vying ideas they offered as solutions. We've discovered that again, in the muck and dirt left behind by Westminster parties clamoring to love banks, power, wealth and celebrity. We've re-discovered a shared glimpse of a different future where people are more important than profit and where economies are part of society, not the other way round. We've been fed a lie for 40 years that nasty right wing neo-liberal politics and economics is the natural law of human society and that there can be no other way. In Scotland many of us did something remarkable, we discovered that we don't see the world that way. And remember, not "I don't see the world that way", WE. We don't buy it any more. In our biggest city and many of our towns, we don't buy it. In our poorest places, we won't buy it. In our younger generation and our housing schemes, we see something different. We began to imagine something better. We did that. Us. In Scotland.
It looks for all the world that we are indeed "we" and that we intend to remain so because we have unfinished business. It's not just some poorly defined business either, our unfinished business is the bedrock of what we want our lives (and our kids lives) to become. Such matters were once the business of political parties and the vying ideas they offered as solutions. We've discovered that again, in the muck and dirt left behind by Westminster parties clamoring to love banks, power, wealth and celebrity. We've re-discovered a shared glimpse of a different future where people are more important than profit and where economies are part of society, not the other way round. We've been fed a lie for 40 years that nasty right wing neo-liberal politics and economics is the natural law of human society and that there can be no other way. In Scotland many of us did something remarkable, we discovered that we don't see the world that way. And remember, not "I don't see the world that way", WE. We don't buy it any more. In our biggest city and many of our towns, we don't buy it. In our poorest places, we won't buy it. In our younger generation and our housing schemes, we see something different. We began to imagine something better. We did that. Us. In Scotland.
This business then. the business of making our society a fairer, more compassionate, more humane existence, rather than a competitive, sharp elbowed war of all against all, that journey won't be via #the45 or angry gatherings like it. Those things are fleeting reflections of our different confused reactions to a first defeat.
We won't stay there, we can't, there's no energy or progress in pissing and moaning at some great unfair "other" or others, to treat us better. Our revolutionary business will find its energy and politics in making the world the way we want it to be: in the donations to food banks that we've seen arise in Glasgow; in the commitments being made by people joining political parties, and in the awareness that when we listen to each other we are so much better informed than when we listen to voices who mendaciously support the rich and powerful. We'll do that. Us.
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| Glasgow shows the way |
We've come an awful long way and there's no doubt we've an awful long way to go, but we're us, we're Scots by choice. Many of us (at least 45%) want a better Scotland that is supportive and compassionate for its people, peaceful and progressive in the world, and most of all we want a Scotland that allows its people to become the folk they have the potential to be.
I'm in for the long haul. We're going to do this. Positively, wonderfully, beautifully and we will shake the world. All of us who want to be called us. Thanks Alex Salmond for helping wake us to who we are. We'll take it from here.
