My country?
What does that mean?
Which country?
When it does not know?
The one of my birth?
Or the one of my forebears?
And which of them?
For they are not from one place.
The country on my passport?
Or the one in which I live?
The union in which it is said I live?
But of which most seem unaware?
Or the real, divided, and oppressive state
That governs against the will of so many?
My country?
What is real?
My country?
What do I want?
My country?
That should unite
My country?
Of which to be proud?
My country
That I do not know
My country
The place to which I aspire
My country
That might never be
My country
That I want to share
Our country
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This makes me think of Kenan Malik’s article on White identity in today’s Observer.
He makes some excellent points on what can really unite people, not necessarily referring to a country, but to what he calls “a sense of commonality with those sharing [one’s] values and aspirations”.
These values and aspirations should be based on solidarity.
Within and beyond borders.
Yes Marie – agree with all of that – but if the Government is not going to facilitate solidarity via economic and social security policy and wants to continue to pitch one part of the social strata against another………..?
You can only share in what we all have access to. Our world – this (dis-)United Kingdom – is not that place at this moment.
This struck a chord with me:
‘Or the real, divided, and oppressive state
That governs against the will of so many?’
The crowd noted on Saturday during the people’s march for another BREXIT vote that when the speakers spoke, the helicopters appeared and their noisy rotor blades meant that the PA system had to be turned up otherwise they would not be heard.
What a country this is turning into eh? A country that is the supposedly the base for the ‘mother of Parliaments’?
‘ Mother of Parliaments’? My arse.
We not only need to halt BREXIT. We need to take back our country from international grocery clerks like Liam Fox and John Redwood who are willing to pile us high and sell us cheap to the lowest bidder like the United States.
Did anyone listen to Radio 4 yesterday talking about ethanol production? Apparently a lot of East Yorkshire was getting ready to produce bio-fuel to add to unleaded petrol – Unleaded 95 has 5% ethanol and the idea was to increase it to 10% to help bring down green house gas emissions. Some £350 million was invested up front.
Well guess who pulled the plug on this initiative in 2015? Yep – the rapidly re-nastified post Cameron Tories apparently – all that investment wasted. Jobs lost etc., There are some very angry people in East Yorkshire.
I wonder if this deliberate destruction of a home grown ethanol market was done to enable one driven by USA under the guise of ‘inward investment’ when hard BREXIT comes to pass.
Rees-Mogg is right to call Britain a ‘vassal’ state. But of whom? I think I know…………..and isn’t the EU.
You are right. The same words struck a chord.
Also ” My country …that might never be”.
Indeed we have some way to go to reach that country, or to get to one close to it.
We need a different voting system than FPTP.
We need a different administrative organisation for more, not less, devolution. We need more control of the means of production and essential services.
The City will never be controlled, but could it be corrected to avoid the worst excesses?
We need an improved education system which teaches about institutions and civic life from an early age.
We need to engage through community projects and support initiatives at local levels.
Saturday, the same spirit was apparent as when I marched in 2003.
The same mix of people, young and old, from all over that country, from all backgrounds, not usually engaged with politics for the most part.
Both somber and joyful, both determined and hopeful.
So that country exists, it makes a noise, but is ignored.
Because there is another country within it, much more powerful, needing to feed its greed.
It owns the land, the means of production, and the media.
Helicopters drowning speeches are an old trick of authority to silence dissent. They failed miserably, if anything it was so blatant that even people who don’t normally know about this trick noticed what was happening.
In 2003 Blair’s government lined up a dozen tanks along the M4 near Heathrow, in full view of all the hundreds of coaches driving into London for the march. Drones above our heads in Hyde Park for the speeches…they called it security measures…they kept warning about security…well, they were the biggest threat that day.
As Jeni says, young people will not be intimidated, they will not fall for old tricks, they have been informed about them and know all about the new tricks played on Social Media.
I just hope they have the time, energy and stamina to keep fighting for what they want to build. The rear guard will be there to provide support, vote, campaign, educate, and march along when necessary.
I read an article today pondering what the effect on Western Christianity would have been if Adam and Eve had been portrayed in paintings as Africans since DNA analysis reveals our ancestors came out of Africa. Would the British have engaged in the slave trade, for example? Would the American Civil War have taken place? Would Hitler have ever risen to power? Etc.
“There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.”
WH Auden
Thanks, Richard!
Yes, it has to be our country, doesn’t it? The young people are closer in their thinking to ours – they’ll make things happen, in a way we didn’t seem competent enough to follow – at least my generation weren’t, because they included New Labour. Pursuing false gods has weakened two Parties, and the ship of state is listing – it’s back to the old guard to correct the list, but for the young ones to take up a more proactive, vision-led path which will eventually lead us to the place where we really always belonged.
I’ve always known that Britain is part of Europe. Geologically, geographically, historically – our populations and our ideas came from there. The Atlantic is widening – let’s wave cheerfully and let our former colonists pursue their own path away from the light.
Prompted by the same shocking conditions I presume this piece is, Richard, but incisively getting to the heart of the constituent parts, this piece by David Malone is very useful in my opinion;
http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2016/11/culture-matters/
When we understand that culture is not territory,
And values are not people
And everyone has common starting-points But NOT common ends,
Then we’ll have a chance of working our way through the current mess.
It’s uncomfortable but the process of stripping-away our comfortable shibboleths and facing reality is progress.
And if we believe in justice we should equalise those starting points, as John Rawls made clear
An interesting text, thank you.
I especially liked this: “Culture is not static. It is a living conversation. But a conversation will not happen if there is no feeling of respect and generosity.”
A conversation made all the richer when it involves many interlocutors, from all over, and enriches those who take the opportunity to have it, exchange ideas, thoughts, skills.
In our house we have four cultures. Each of us has at least two.
Respect is essential, it starts with listening, and adapting too.
At country level, these mutual listening and adaptation skills could be so much greater than they are, if only they were encouraged and taught at all levels of society.
Cultures have always mixed, enriched each other.
Despite efforts by some to isolate, divide, and oppose them.
I have spent all my life having to work out which “home”, in any given context, is being referred to: my mother spoke of her original home and her current home absolutely indiscriminately. And I’ve always been grateful that this country doesn’t demand I disown her country, where I was born and one of my children now lives in his turn, in favour of the one my father was and we have lived for 60 of my 63 years. My Mom was proud to find that she too could have dual nationality in her own right, rather than by marriage, as she had a British grandfather who was killed in WW1.
I live in daily anticipation and fear of that changing, as ever-increasing displays of “loyalty” are demanded with ever-more explicit menaces. But the fact is that “home” is an ephemeral thing in any life – any married couple who don’t move in with a set of parents will have three from Day One, and women have long been called “homemakers”. In the end men, too, have to learn that anywhere we are – even in the trenches – is somewhere we can make “home”.
“13 Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. 14 For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” (Hebrews 13)
Maybe “home is not where you live but where they understand you.” (attrib. Christian Morgenstern).
As an immigrant from Zambia I only knew one country that I loved and was very good to me – Zambia; but there was also another country that I longed for from somewhere deep down, from my Commonwealth Annuals, my pink regions in the atlas, the stories of fairness, my mother’s tears as she listened to the Queen’s speech on the car radio (she had never left Africa!), and of course the BBC Overseas Service.
So when I was no longer needed in Zambia, I emigrated and fell in love with the people of England. I still am, but have grown to loathe and detest the callously, ignorantly, neo-liberal politicians. They have no love for the people, no moral imagination, and do not represent the British nation one little bit.
We desperately need a revolution.
We Mercians have been having no end of trouble with those Anglians and their continental notions. As for the Northumbrians words fail me, if only because they are men of few words. Forget the Wessex lot, they are going nowhere. As for Kent………….
Typical left wing nonsense. Richard hates our hard working military and anyone proud of serving a greater purpose
Pardon?
What complete nonsense
And what, anyway, has this to do with armed forces?
Steve – if you’ve really been following this blog, let alone knew anything of the man, you’d know that Richard is a very good example of someone serving a greater purpose.
I also wonder Just how much you really understand of the military. It’s a matter of historical record that after people fought together in the military in the last war they came back and voted in the most radical labour government we’ve ever had. Contrary to occasional stereotyping, the military are not a bunch of fascists. Though I suspect that you may have been hanging around with some of the exceptions that exist in any organisation
Steve jones – not Jones?
Clearly been confused by blank verse