Everyone who truly knows me, knows that I've always had a social conscience and that I've spent most of my life fighting losing battles, mostly because I hate injustice, that the law is an ass, that politicians are duty-bound to being completely ineffectual when elected to power and love the life of corruption and corrupt practices formed by ideologies which protect and serve the '1%'. I am by nature a quiet protester, although in the past I've been known to stand up for what I truly believed was the right and proper thing to do.
My rebellious nature is highly ingrained and first surfaced during the late 60s, when my 'hero' at that time was Tariq Ali, one of the student leaders who went on demonstrations and to my young eyes was the ultimate rebel with a cause. At the same time the youth of America rose up in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and then the French students also got involved. It was a fascinating time for me because it showed that people with enough passion could change the world around them. It was a couple of years later that my then aunt Hazel called me a 'Marxist', although I had no idea then what a Marxist was, but it sounded so exciting to have pinned to me a label I could wear with real pride. Equally, even though I was wearing rose tinted glasses, I also saw on my nightly television screen images of the police and state brutality being inflicted on demonstrators for voicing their protests against democratic governments, acting not in the wider interests of society as an whole, but acting to maintain the status quo. Some 40 odd years later nothing has changed.
These were the few years of social upheaval, of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy dying in front of me. Nixon was becoming 'Tricky Dicky' who happily sanctioned the bombing of Cambodia. The photographs of war photojournalist Don McCullin entered my conscience and rammed home the futility and depravity of destruction on innocent people, all in the name of democracy.
Today, as I write this, people are becoming 'occupiers' standing up for their right to a decent life, of following democracy in its purest form of social participation, of trying to hold those responsible for the terrible financial mess the world is suffering from. Today, my conscience is again outraged that 99% of the world is being sacrificed to maintain the corrupt practices of the 1%.
I, like many, cannot get to an occupy site, but I can do something useful but it needs your help. I'm in the process of setting up a bank account in the USA, which will be used to help the OWS groups around the world, and hopefully help a school close to New York, and further help me to set up my own online teaching company so that I can subsidise lessons for people who can't afford to pay but who should be helped to make a better life for themselves. Everyone needs a break sometimes.
All you have to do is go and buy either one of my two published e-books, 'Danny's Navel Adventure' and 'Nick and Jenny'. They each cost $3.99, which is the price of one cup of coffee! That one cup of coffee is going to, hopefully, make a real difference to the world we live in. Click on the books at the top right-hand corner or the link here and it will take you straight to the page where you can buy either book.
All of us have the opportunity, right now, to make a small difference. There are people out there trying to make the world a better place, and that's the world I want to live in.
Thank you for your support!
Warm regards
Tony
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