The slow death of hope

Alun Smith

We’re all so very, very tired aren’t we? Banker, borrower, barrow-boy and balladeer, we’re tired.

Wherever we work, whether we can work, whether we’re right, left or centre is increasingly irrelevant because we’re all down.

From the men and women who run our hospital wards and sweep our streets, to the guys and girls who make the coffee, the small business owner who runs the shop, who pays his staff but not himself, to the middle-management maestro, who “just can’t take it anymore”. We are exhausted.

And this is not some end-of-day fatigue. It’s more ethereal, more vague and yet more pervasive than that.

We feel a collective loss and a collective, resultant, trauma from that loss. The people of these islands have endured nigh on twenty years of managed decline of the very fabric of our society, at the hands of people who have repeatedly shown us who and what they are.

It’s difficult to define what it is exactly that I think we’ve lost, but the simplest phrase, the one that pulsates in my head like a persistent, bass-line, droning alarm, the one that comes closest to expressing what we’re all going through is, I think…the death of hope.

Everywhere I look, people are all cried out, wrung out, from years of gradual but consistent, imperceptible, yet deliberate, atrophication. Our life-blood, our dreams and ambitions, our environment and well-being, our colour and our joy have been systematically carved out, chopped up, packaged and sold off to whichever dog is snarling loudest, whichever bad actor is showing the most blood-stained teeth.

Misery-go-round

We are tired of riding on this misery-go-round of political performance art. Like unwilling, voiceless puppets in someone else’s pantomime, we are subjected to the daily whims of the political classes, buffeted and bounced through peaks and troughs of momentary relief and crushing despair, whilst they dine out on our tomorrows.

We’re sick of ‘them’. We’re sick of the people who hold all the cards and yet keep ace after ace after ace up their sleeves. We’re sick of their broken promises, their broken ceasefires, their performative righteousness and their changeable morality flags that flutter and stutter like a butterfly in a jet-stream. We’re angry. The entire country is angry. But…..

Every passing moment is another chance to turn it all around. All we need is the will. We have the laws, the infrastructure, the money and the technology to relax the shoulders of every single man, woman and child in this disunited kingdom. The solutions are there. They are sometimes astonishingly obvious and they’re sometimes hiding behind the twin shadows of historical precedent or traditional imperative but they are there.

If we want to heal, first we have to stop the bleeding. To do that, we need to do our politics differently. We need far more collaborative, cross-party communication and no more us-and-them, culture-war catastrophising. We need to get shot of peccadillo politics and the pursuit of the personal wish list.

We need a 1945 scale overhaul of our entire way of doing things. We need wealth redistribution on a massive scale. We need water, energy, travel and communication to be nationalised. We need to stop the privatisation by stealth of our NHS and we absolutely must tax the living pin-stripes out of the fat-cat, future-slayers that dominate our lives.

Dignity

We need welfare reform so that the system is indeed about people’s welfare and dignity and they don’t have to jump through hoops of fire just to get a modicum of respect, where the system is built on carrot and not stick.

Finally, we need to banish our entitlement and our selfishness and truly understand that if one of us is hurt, we are ALL hurt. If one of us is left behind, we are all lost. If one of us is killed, we ALL die a little bit….if we start to understand that and we start to take tentative steps towards a common good then hope can and will thrive again.

Hope is the morning rain that follows the drought, or the sun after the flood.
Hope is the sparkle in a young persons eyes.
To lean towards hope is what the rainbow does.
Hope is tomorrow, when the heartbreak dies.