I suppose you’ve still gotta hope, right?

There’s been a lot of stuff getting me down lately. Following the 2016 illegally fought and won advisory referendum on our membership of the most successful peace-project in human history (yeah, alright, I’m over-egging the pudding a bit; I know the EU isn’t perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than any possible outcome we’re now faced with), the UK press are still pushing for this fucking catastrophe and since then we’ve gone from ‘£350 million a week for the NHS’ to ‘People will have the food they need’ and ‘Nah, we won’t abide by the law if we don’t feel like it’. This is not the same thing.

Over the pond, people are still sending ‘thoughts and prayers’ to families of shooting victims, while at the same time making it easier for any Trump-inspired numpty to buy an automatic death machine.

Still no sign of governments anywhere doing anything to tackle climate change that might actually make an appreciable difference – no, setting fire to the Amazon rainforest doesn’t count. But, there might be reason here for hope. For young people all over the world are no longer content to sit back and watch their future burn and are fighting back. Awareness of the scale of the issue is increasing everywhere and rich old white men are working hard to discredit the movement by launching consistent personal attacks on young figurehead Greta Thunberg. So far, little significant change has happened, but the movement is gaining ground and if the tide turns, then maybe climate change won’t be the civilisation-ender it’s gearing up to be.

Too many powerful people with a vested interest in things staying the way they are preventing real change for there to be anything more than a tiny chance, but you never know, and I’m trying not to take the ‘it’s a lost cause, might as well give up’ route, like Jonathan Franzen, who, quite frankly, appears to be trying to convince people not to disrupt the status quo so he can live out the rest of his life not having to give a shit. (I'm not linking to his article, because it's the last thing he deserves, but I will link to this glorious counterpoint.) It’s hard and there are still days when all feels lost, but kids with a lot more to lose than I have (I’ve already had 40 years, they haven’t) and people much, much smarter than I am haven’t given up yet. I suppose I can do no less.

Occasional feature: Ending with a song loosely related to the post (or more like a lyric I can take out of context and loosely relate to the post):

The Strokes: Heart in a Cage: “So don’t teach me a lesson, ‘cause I’ve already learned; the sun will be shining and my children will burn.”

Things change.

You can’t stop the arrow of time. Things, people, societies, they all evolve. Things that used to be a good idea don’t remain a good idea forever. That’s why religious texts look sillier the more we learn. The things in the Bible, in the Koran, the things those on the fanatical outer fringes of religions (or death cults, to put it more accurately) believe are, in the cold, scientific light of day, obviously nonsense. It isn’t the fault of the books, the religions or the people who wrote them. They are merely products of their time, attempts to understand and describe their Universe as best they can. But, things change. Most of us know it wouldn’t be right to stone an adulterous woman to death. Most of us know that homosexuality is not something to be reviled. Most of us know that the Universe is billions of years old, not thousands. Those that don’t tend to be strongly religious. Funny, that.

I apologise for any offence I may cause Americans now, but your Constitution is not immune to this. The 1787 US Constitution is the shortest written constitution and this reverence accorded it is so embedded that to suggest it is flawed in any way is akin to heresy. Mostly it works fine, and is a beautiful example of a set of articles that can be used to successfully govern a large number of people. When the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, I doubt they looked at their muskets and foresaw the utterly terrifying array of fully automatic weaponry that is so easy to purchase nowadays. Of course, they knew very well in 2008, when it was confirmed that the Second Amendment applied to any fucknut on the street who wants a gun. The pressure from the NRA and the fact that pointing out that sometimes a gun is a dangerous thing is political suicide might have had something to do with that.

I’m not saying the US is alone in worshipping old Constitutions – we are very fond of our own 1215 Magna Carta, more than five-and-a-half centuries earlier than America’s, but viewing it in a glass case isn’t tantamount to a religious experience. If people are allowed to carry guns, other people are going to get shot. It really is that simple. The much-celebrated right to bear arms is defective in a modern society, and if you want people to stop getting shot, you need to retract that right, at least partly. Gun crime is almost unheard of here. It has been much reduced in Australia since a change in law was adopted following a tragic shooting incident in 1996. The sad truth is many, many more people will have to die before anything changes. But hey, an outdated civil liberty applicable to a different age is more important than life, isn’t it?