As I stood before the entrance of departure-Heathrow, I couldn’t help but to think of the words by George Orwell’s 1984: “Big Brother is watching you”.
There I was; surrounded by a faceless crowd entering the building, checking-in their bags from no-name brands to Versace, browsing the local shops, and stuffing themselves with the grub from countless restaurants – oblivious of the armed men in their bullet-proof vests backed up by their impersonal glaring camera counterparts in each corner. The forefront of the crowd (including me) was queuing at the entrance of Departures, with ‘bulldogs’ scrutinizing our every move and barking at us to place our liquids in little plastic bags. With shaky hands, some young mother tried to calm her screaming child as she obeyed the bulldogs’ commands. One man started an argument with one of the bulldogs over the size of his laptop case; bit by bit, the hoard of flesh moved forward into phase two of delightful departures.
Phase two – the crowd gets broken up in segments by barriers, much like those on a cattle ranch, the queuing hoard awaiting scrutiny by eye, hand and machine. We get ordered as usual to place our belongings in containers, but then a new order dawns: “Off with your shoes, place them on the conveyor!” Without any hesitation, we do as we are told, and barefooted we stroll through the metal detector; our damp naked feet creating brief vapoury prints on the cold floor.
And so, with naked feet, we scrambled to get our chaotically squashed belongings from the conveyor belt’s end, desperate for the oasis of consumerist splendour that awaited us a breath’s length away. (I sarcastically remarked that one of these days, they will probably make us walk naked, whipping us profilactically just in case we might be terrorists).
“It is for your safety”, they will say. For our safety, hmm.
So for our safety we get treated like sheep and cattle awaiting the slaughter; like nameless, faceless drones, conveyored through with disregard and disrespect. The task of mothers to feed their babies gets much tougher than it already is in an overcrowded economy class area, and we all get a “good boy” pat on the back by glazing our eyes with ‘duty free’ consumerism.
We have to ask ourselves two little questions:
Firstly, why do we have a safety issue anyway? Where did it come from? Why do these so called evil individuals exist, plaguing our minds with terrorist fear, gnawing at the basements of our sanity? What created them? We do after all live in a universe where action begets reaction, don’t we? So somewhere, the ‘western world’ must have done something behind the scenes; something so vile and hideous, that it sparked the blind and evil hatred that now ‘creates’ this abuse in disguise that is called ‘safety precautions’.
Secondly, why do we as individuals let ourselves be treated this way? Why do we act like sheep, grazing the consumerism fields while we timidly await our slaughter?
You might laugh at the harsh ‘slaughter’ word, but dare to think outside the box of your day to day existence, and see the bigger picture:
If we look back on our recent history, will we notice how our freedoms are being taken away in stealth mode. Slowly but surely, the hoarding methods are becoming less humane. Think of the harsher treatment at airports, the CCTV cameras on each street corner, armed police everywhere you look, the strenuous passport control of ‘lesser nations’, the proposed ID cards and compulsory Criminal Records Bureau check (which accidentally made a teenaged girl a convicted felon in their first year of operation).
Bit by bit, the water is slowly brought to boiling point; the boiling point of an Orwellian society, where there is no more room for smiles or laughter, companionship and friendly smiles between strangers. We are becoming a massive hive, where most of us are drones, slaving away for the elite in their air-conditioned offices, sipping their café latte’s while they think of more clever ideas to suck the milking cows drier without them noticing.
Remember Plato’s cave analogy: “To keep slaves from rebelling, make them believe that they are free”.
And how are we kept in this delusion?
By allowing us the ‘freedom of choice’. The choice of the colour car you want, which supermarket to shop at, hundreds of television channels and which bank to keep your money ‘safe’.
Democrat or Republican, Labour (excuse me, New Labour) or Conservative, thus the puppet on the left or the one on the right.
In the end, standing back from the labyrinth we find ourselves in, we realise that we are merely following the preconceived pathways that have been placed there for us to choose from – in order to make us believe we are free.
But the signs of oppression are showing. It is seeping from our collective being like water from an oversaturated sponge. No matter how much we have – be it money, or the pleasures we attain by it – there is always that low hum in the shadows of our subconscious minds, playing tricks with us when we dream at night. The hum of sub-acute discontent that presents itself as our ‘depression’, obesity, self-harm, substance abuse, and family violence. And lest we forget those super celebrities with their ever quest for happiness in clubs, sexual endeavours, mansions, private jets and plastic surgery frenzies.
Ironic then that even the elite - the puppet masers pulling those very strings for self-gain and harming the puppets with their stealth abuse and slavery – are suffering from the same lack of freedom; the freedom to unconditionally love…
There I was; surrounded by a faceless crowd entering the building, checking-in their bags from no-name brands to Versace, browsing the local shops, and stuffing themselves with the grub from countless restaurants – oblivious of the armed men in their bullet-proof vests backed up by their impersonal glaring camera counterparts in each corner. The forefront of the crowd (including me) was queuing at the entrance of Departures, with ‘bulldogs’ scrutinizing our every move and barking at us to place our liquids in little plastic bags. With shaky hands, some young mother tried to calm her screaming child as she obeyed the bulldogs’ commands. One man started an argument with one of the bulldogs over the size of his laptop case; bit by bit, the hoard of flesh moved forward into phase two of delightful departures.
Phase two – the crowd gets broken up in segments by barriers, much like those on a cattle ranch, the queuing hoard awaiting scrutiny by eye, hand and machine. We get ordered as usual to place our belongings in containers, but then a new order dawns: “Off with your shoes, place them on the conveyor!” Without any hesitation, we do as we are told, and barefooted we stroll through the metal detector; our damp naked feet creating brief vapoury prints on the cold floor.
And so, with naked feet, we scrambled to get our chaotically squashed belongings from the conveyor belt’s end, desperate for the oasis of consumerist splendour that awaited us a breath’s length away. (I sarcastically remarked that one of these days, they will probably make us walk naked, whipping us profilactically just in case we might be terrorists).
“It is for your safety”, they will say. For our safety, hmm.
So for our safety we get treated like sheep and cattle awaiting the slaughter; like nameless, faceless drones, conveyored through with disregard and disrespect. The task of mothers to feed their babies gets much tougher than it already is in an overcrowded economy class area, and we all get a “good boy” pat on the back by glazing our eyes with ‘duty free’ consumerism.
We have to ask ourselves two little questions:
Firstly, why do we have a safety issue anyway? Where did it come from? Why do these so called evil individuals exist, plaguing our minds with terrorist fear, gnawing at the basements of our sanity? What created them? We do after all live in a universe where action begets reaction, don’t we? So somewhere, the ‘western world’ must have done something behind the scenes; something so vile and hideous, that it sparked the blind and evil hatred that now ‘creates’ this abuse in disguise that is called ‘safety precautions’.
Secondly, why do we as individuals let ourselves be treated this way? Why do we act like sheep, grazing the consumerism fields while we timidly await our slaughter?
You might laugh at the harsh ‘slaughter’ word, but dare to think outside the box of your day to day existence, and see the bigger picture:
If we look back on our recent history, will we notice how our freedoms are being taken away in stealth mode. Slowly but surely, the hoarding methods are becoming less humane. Think of the harsher treatment at airports, the CCTV cameras on each street corner, armed police everywhere you look, the strenuous passport control of ‘lesser nations’, the proposed ID cards and compulsory Criminal Records Bureau check (which accidentally made a teenaged girl a convicted felon in their first year of operation).
Bit by bit, the water is slowly brought to boiling point; the boiling point of an Orwellian society, where there is no more room for smiles or laughter, companionship and friendly smiles between strangers. We are becoming a massive hive, where most of us are drones, slaving away for the elite in their air-conditioned offices, sipping their café latte’s while they think of more clever ideas to suck the milking cows drier without them noticing.
Remember Plato’s cave analogy: “To keep slaves from rebelling, make them believe that they are free”.
And how are we kept in this delusion?
By allowing us the ‘freedom of choice’. The choice of the colour car you want, which supermarket to shop at, hundreds of television channels and which bank to keep your money ‘safe’.
Democrat or Republican, Labour (excuse me, New Labour) or Conservative, thus the puppet on the left or the one on the right.
In the end, standing back from the labyrinth we find ourselves in, we realise that we are merely following the preconceived pathways that have been placed there for us to choose from – in order to make us believe we are free.
But the signs of oppression are showing. It is seeping from our collective being like water from an oversaturated sponge. No matter how much we have – be it money, or the pleasures we attain by it – there is always that low hum in the shadows of our subconscious minds, playing tricks with us when we dream at night. The hum of sub-acute discontent that presents itself as our ‘depression’, obesity, self-harm, substance abuse, and family violence. And lest we forget those super celebrities with their ever quest for happiness in clubs, sexual endeavours, mansions, private jets and plastic surgery frenzies.
Ironic then that even the elite - the puppet masers pulling those very strings for self-gain and harming the puppets with their stealth abuse and slavery – are suffering from the same lack of freedom; the freedom to unconditionally love…
1 comment:
I love your blog its true what you say.
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