Manifesto

The world is fucked.

Seriously, there is so much wrong that it's driving me nuts. I want to do something, but I don't know where to start. The opportunities for action seem so limited. Join a group. Write letters to politicians. Go to meetings and protest rallies. Save the forests. Save the whales. Free, free Palestine. Down with plastic bags. Buy fair trade coffee and free range chicken. Recycle.

Fine, but it really doesn't seem like enough. A few powerful people have the ability to completely over-ride anything I do, anything millions of people like me can do. Look at the Iraq war for example: millions, literally millions of us protested, made our views known in no uncertain terms, and look at what happened: Bush & Blair & John Howard just decided that we were all wrong, and went ahead and did it anyway.

Becoming a trained counsellor and psychotherapist is good too. I can make a real difference to the people who come to me for help. A profound difference. Help them turn their lives around. It's wonderful and inspiring. But it's one person at a time. And it's slow. I have this little argument in my head that sometimes I find convincing, that says that each person that I help becomes a therapeutic influence on those around them: family, friends, others in their workplace, people they meet in the street and at the shops... and their influence on those people makes them a little bit happier, nicer, and so on, with ripples moving outward into the world. So I'm not really just helping one person at a time. Sounds good to me sometimes, but at the moment, watching the world go down the tubes, it just doesn't seem to be enough. By the time those few of us who are even half-decent humanistic therapists have influenced enough people that it might change something, the world population will have doubled, the temperature will have risen by 5 or 6 degrees, and it will all have been too little too late.

The only people who seem to have the power to do something on a sufficient scale are heads of state and of the biggest multinational companies. Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, Ban Ki Moon... Maybe even Kevin Rudd, although by the time you get to him, there's probably not that much point. But forgetting that for a moment, assuming they really can make a difference, how do you get to be one of these people? Join a political party. Kiss arses. Toe the line. Compromise. Like in the Leonard Cohen song:

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within

Same sort of thing in business. Work your way up from the bottom. But it's worse than that. It's not just the compromise. If you want to rise to the top in politics or business, you have to be ruthless, single-minded. You have to want power and be prepared to do anything to get it. Nice guys don't get preselection. They don't make billions of dollars. They don't get the backing of the powerful special-interest groups. They open doors for others and have them slammed in their faces. You want real power. You have to be prepared to get your hands dirty and bloody. You have to be prepared to climb over the bleeding bodies of your friends and family to get there. That's the way the system works. These forces are built into the fabric of our so-called civilisation. It's survival of the fittest out there. Western civilisation: individualism, greed, competition, war...

I guess I could, you know. Join a party. Go to meetings. Pay my dues. Try to look good, to speak well. Get noticed. Maybe get to be a candidate, hopefully get elected. Make some deals, try not to compromise myself too much, try to keep some sort of freedom of action, keep the constraints to a minimum. Assuming it all goes perfectly, maybe get some minor ministry in twenty years. Try to make some good decisions, change policy incrementally a little bit for the better, within the bounds of party policy, the budget, what I can persuade people to do, knowing that we'd eventually lose government again and that chances are any good work would be undone by my replacement...

It doesn't look promising. What I really want is to be dictator of the world. To be able to say something like, I decree that from now on there will be no more weapons made in the world, and that all weapons factories will immediately start manufacturing solar panels, windmills or water pumps instead. And for it to happen. Just like that. We all know it has to, or we're all doomed.

But the chances of me becoming ruler of the world are, frankly, not too good.

But I don't want to implode. I have to do something. I have to start somewhere. I have to at least express myself, unblock some of this energy, this anger, this frustration, and get it out there. If I don't, I think I might go mad. Certainly depressed, and I know what that's like, and I'm not interested in going back down that path. Or, more accurately, I'm not interested in continuing down that path.

Hence this blog.

Of course it's better to actually do something about the state of the world. All I'm really doing here is complaining, whingeing. Hence the title. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. A whinge a day keeps the cuckoo doctor away. (My friend calls counsellors "cuckoo doctors".) In that sense this is selfish. It's about my own mental health, emotional health. Getting it out there rather than letting it fester inside and eat me up with cancer or multiple sclerosis or some other stress- and/or emotion-related chronic degenerative disease.

It's also about the people around me. Instead of burdening them with my moods, my negativity, my defeatism, my glass-half-empty view of the way the world is, I'll put all of that here, and I hope that will make me a bit more pleasant to be around. Because I know, because I've been told, that I'm a bit of a pain at the moment.

But there's more to this than making myself easier to live with, for me as well as those close to me. I think. Maybe, just maybe, complaining out loud will help to free up my own processes, get those juices flowing. Maybe if I can get it all out of me I won't feel so blocked and angry and stuck and confused and depressed. Maybe my thoughts will come clearer and instead of the caged lion decision process I've tried to express above, going around and around in circles, making plan after plan and then demolishing each of them... Maybe things will resolve themselves and I'll know what to do, I'll know why I'm here and action will follow. Let's hope so.