If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next

If you tolerate this

Your children will be next

Desolate child.

Wrapped in cloth and leather,

Lying in stagnation.

The best cloth and leather on the planet.

Sent directly to his parcel.

From every corner of his world everything he needed gravitated towards him.

In a basket he was offered to the river.

Putting faith in the security that whispered through the reeds.

Sheltered from the horrors that ravaged the land.

Entrance on one condition:

In exchange for paper he relinquish his questioning nature.

An impulse that guided his early days.

This system was everything and outside of it there was nothing.

Ease yourself into its flow.

Have faith in it.

As quickly as paper came in it went.

But it didn’t stop coming or going.

His pockets owned the paper no more than a river bed owns water.

The people lying on the banks of the system didn’t matter.

They only served as a reminder for the destitution that awaited if you gave in to curiosity.

Or if you couldn’t keep up with the system’s exhausting pace.

Available to him were many ways to repress curiosity.

Times when the mind might wander were swallowed up.

Be ashamed of boredom and be afraid of a wandering mind.

Though it resembled nature it was manufactured.

A canal posing as a river,

it was seen as timeless and immovable.

The only worry was the paper coming in.

How things came to be put before him didn’t matter.

The answer to every natural pang was a price.

Questions circling the causes and consequences of the experience of his existence

Along with guilt were exported.

He is the child of parents who have exported consequence.

There was no room left for guilt to be exported however.

It built up and ran into his existence.

His existence that was supposed to gently roll away from consequence.

The system failed to support itself.

With its pervading guiding principle:

Out of sight out of mind.

It ignored when there would be no room left out of sight

and when consequence would force itself into mind.

His paper was a veneer of harmony.

The horrors that cut through the land were a lie.

A lie that compelled mothers to surrender their children to the river.

So that their time could be extracted. 

Poisoning rivers for canals

For lives of luxury of very lives.

A sacrifice that is no ones to make.

The system betrayed itself.

Passed down through a few generations with the security of a ticking bomb.

A war declared on generation as well as class.

Lying in stagnation the paper seems useless.

Struggling for gulps of air.

The gaseous nature of which saved it from dominion.

Intellect

The wind quivers your quiff whilst your head is held high. Your eyes are fixated on a problem that’s sitting on the top of a tree. Your brown rollie wheezes in and out and crumbles, smoke hangs around you briefly, you blow it away but your eyes don’t leave the tree. Obviously this is a problem I couldn’t fathom, if you had a spare minute in between rolling another bifter and looking like you’re absolutely dying to get back to a book I would love for you to have a look down your nose at me and tell me about the planes you’re on that I’ll never reach.

You’re an intellectual, you’re pretty confident of that, you tick all the boxes, never mind what’s in your head, what leaves your mouth is condescending enough for ten smart fellers. You’re pretty sure that everyone else thinks you’re an intellectual too, it doesn’t half feel secure.

‘The system is broken’, you say, no doubt you’ve had a good old think about it. ‘People are compelled to fill social roles. Guided by culture, lost souls get jobs, mortgages, cars, houses, girlfriends and boyfriends, husbands and wives, kids and grandkids and eventually die having never really strayed from the motorway that is social norms.’

‘Too right’, I say, ‘I’m going to have a good think about things too now. I don’t want to live my life blindly doing the things I should do, I’m going to find what makes me happy and do that. I’m glad I caught you with a spare minute to enlighten me, intellectual.’

You’ve left me with a nagging feeling though, something’s a bit off. Captivated by your address the thought daren’t cross my mind, but, aren’t you playing the same game as those people you were talking about earlier? Those with spouses and mortgages? Aren’t you too complying to a social norm? You’re living and dying by the intellectual sword.

You’re in a category just as they are and to categorise is to divide. To consider yourself as an intellectual and to foster that opinion in other people is to say that people are inherently different. To give someone a name presupposes an identity on that person and people are compelled to live their life according to that name. A name confines someone to the extent and limitations of that name.

This is an unhealthy relationship with knowledge and learning, it creates the knowledgable and the unknowledgeable, the inferior and the superior, it assumes that intellect is one thing that you either have or don’t. It creates an unattainable world of intellect and encourages intellectual stagnation.

‘Admire my intellect, proven by me being seen here, smoking and staring at a tree. Concede that I am working at a level that you will never reach.’

People aren’t one thing continuously for one hundred percent of the time. A baker doesn’t bake bread twenty four hours a day and a mechanic doesn’t only ever have engines on the brain. Someone considered stupid will undoubtedly have their moments of genius in life and a university professor will leave their shopping on the bus from time to time. Naming someone as intellectual doesn’t allow for the fluidity of human behaviour. A gap in knowledge being exposed, the admission ‘I don’t know’, is cause for shame. The fear of this occurring is so great that intellectuals band together and are very content patting each other on the back and celebrating their genius. Superiority is employed to discourage those considered un able to contribute to any mental exploration to engage in intellectual debate.

‘You will never reach the mental heights me and my pals are at mate so don’t even bother.’

Translates to,

‘Jesus, don’t try and poke holes in what I’m saying, I might get kicked out of my dead clever club.’

This poor lad has just been at the receiving end of a mental tirade, I’ve never spoken to him. I’m walking away thinking that he is a flawed human being and I’ve figured him out. The chip is on my shoulder, I am the one who is engaging in this system of superior and inferior, the existence of my own intellect is based on the opinion of others, if I am called clever once I will cling to it forever, vehemently refuting any claim to the contrary, a teacher said I was clever once, so I am, constantly. If I am treated inferiorly by someone who is well versed in asserting their intellectual superiority, I will never reach intellectual heights, I am perpetuating this cycle.

‘Sorry mate.’ I say to the lad having a moment with the tree.

He just looks at me like he has no idea what’s going on. He doesn’t, obviously, because to him, someone has just stopped in front of him with a strained look on his face for five minutes, said sorry and got off.