There is a Sun Up There!
There is a Sun Up There!
There is a sun up there! It has been shining today and over the past weekend. I am pleased to see it, as for the past three years there has been little rays of light over the Northern parts of the UK. There is a moon up there too as I write these words, it is at the moment at the halfway point of its lunar cycle. Both have been shining now for some years over this world, both must have witnessed quite a lot of drama over time.
I was born in the sixties, a time of social revolution where it is said the fairest of our species in the UK and America burned their bra’s and harnessed a new conscience of Girl-Power. It was also a time of some very inspirational work from various quarters; music, art, film, theatre and literature. Floyd, Moody Blues, The Doors, Motown and various others challenged authority in the social statements they were making. America was at war in Vietnam, and many fled to Canada to evade conscription into a conflict that young people just didn’t understand. And Black Americans themselves were beginning to make progress into being accepted by what in essence was, a government that fed only the white homo sapien descendants of the European; this European himself; in truth, a squatter on someone else’s land; that of the North American Indian. I was born in the sixties during the time fashion icons strutted new forms of expression promoted by elitists that had the money to open shops in Carnaby Street, and sell their wares at inflated prices to the ‘in crowd’ whose conscience was already tapped by use of hallucinogenics they believed would open realms to another world, perhaps a misguided myth that one would only gain respect if expressing oneself creatively during altered states. The new liberalism in many ways gave freedoms to young eager minds that had in the past, been too restricted and oppressed. Still though, I sit here today as a casualty of the generation that termed the phrase; ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out.’ Free love and free expression! That’s what it was all about. You try telling that to a generation born to this so called, ‘free love!’ “Momma! Who’s my father?”
In many ways I cannot blame them, for too long people were not allowed the expression of youth and zest for life that runs through every young Adults veins. But what is becoming apparent now, what seems to be emerging, is that there are an awful lot of people born to that particular era that find it difficult to identify with their previous generations selfishness. What we seem to be doing, is wiping the arse of what in essence was a pile of shit! I can in the main agree to a lot of misgivings that were expressed about society back then. But where I find it difficult to believe the sincerity of the previous generation, is in its own attitude to their children. My Ma n Pa talked often of the old days. How they would dance at The Cavern, and often as myself and my fellow siblings played in rags on a Sunday I could see my parents looking adoringly at each other as Simon Bates played yet another song from the past and asks; “What year was this?”
The year was in fact 1977, although you wouldn’t have guessed it on the street where I lived. The only modern sign of development; was the block of flats opposite our terraced house. Flats we used to play football in until my friends and I witnessed the suicide of a woman who had jumped from the seventh floor. Technology had given us the capability to sit on top of each other in boxes where pets were not allowed. Yet, the occasional glue sniffing den was overlooked until the occupants began making nuisance of themselves; occupants that were only a couple of years older than I. ‘What year was this?’ Simon Bates would ask as my skinny hands reached into my pockets to grasp the coins to purchase a shirt to wear from the jumble sale at the church school that was behind our house. A church school whose care-taker often chased us away for playing football on the only grass that didn’t have dog-shit on. ‘What year was this?’ - Boomed within my ears while I passed the fifty pence from my paper-round money to the girl with the money box, for a shirt that was worn and slightly torn. ‘What year was this?’ Echoed menacingly, just to make sure I had it all in stock in my photographic memory, while watching the Viking land on Mars and start exploration, eating cheap meat at the time from a stew that made me want to retch, until I learned to swallow the cheap gristle by placing it under my tongue and swallowing with water, like aspirin to cure some kind of ailment. My Ma n Pa would look longingly in each other’s eyes and confer on the track, oblivious to the siblings kicking fekk out of each other for the lack of understanding and lack of acknowledgement that we existed. All the water in the world couldn’t make me swallow that amount of gristle, still though, the need to retch and the sick sense and sixth sense told me that, I shouldn’t be here, or rather, nobody wanted us here. We, we’re just in the way of something so transparent, that anyone with any amount of truth in themselves would see it for all its fraudulent projection and like a screen that failed under the exposure – from the light of a sudden truth, it would shatter, and then, there is the very real possibility that we may even have to be acknowledged as valid, living human beings. Human beings that, as children, were never afforded any rights. My only hope was in learning, but, that too was thwarted at an early age by a school teacher complicit in all the abuses given to I and anyone with any ounce of intellect from my generation. A generation that way into the eighties could never put on music we liked in pubs for the same old sixties listings of out dated excuses for the older generation to continue their reverie and force unwanted paradigms’ of,- ‘seen and not heard,’ upon children whose minds were sharper still, than those who thought they knew it all!
Parent, oblique stroke children, no descending lines of acceptance! Only a disengagement from the truth that is the denial they still uphold to this day. My generation were not educated. We didn’t have in many respects the freedoms expressed by those to whom we have been born. Only now, when the globe is screaming for sanctuary are we beginning to see what has been denied all those years. And that is Life! Life that now in our later years we can say whole heartedly, ‘they’ never wanted us to have. Out of all of this, is the sad recognition that the jealousy for modern generations as expressed through various abuses by older generations, is their knowingness that we could have done a lot better with this world, had they given us a fair chance and a fair choice to be educated to all that ails us. But, instead, they would rather we be like them, so still to this day they keep many a mushroom in the dark. Because the enlightenment that can spark recovery will be the guilt for their failures. And so stubborn is the old world to new forms of society, they would have the planet die before admitting they were wrong. The tune in drop out theory, it wasn’t a contest. It wasn’t even a debate or exchange or rebellion. It was, just an excuse to rock up. Get pissed and party, all done under the illusion of progress, because when you get down to the bare knuckles of wrestling with the injustices that are now being faced by this world, it may be too late to do anything about them. Because they never taught you, just so you could fail, just so they can continue their preach of ignorance, and you be at the mercy of their law.
There will be a new moon soon. It will look down on a planet that is deluded by power. The new moon will be a splendour on a cloudless night. It will be something to marvel when thinking of the ‘New World Order’ they say they are trying to introduce. But the new moon has a different place in space and time than all those previously, not like the New World Order which is in honesty, the Old World Order keeping grips on power with ‘new zeal.’ The difference though, is that in many ways the clouds for this headline have shifted too, and people can recognise it for what it is, but, the real question is, will you teach your children of this, or look longingly into your partners eyes when in parenthood, and claim to know the name of the manufactured boy band singing songs of love?
Michael J Waite. April 2011.
