The journey we are on....
(Easier to hate than to imagine....)
So here I am writing to you on a bus to Inverness on the way up to see my family for Christmas.
I’m on the bus because even at the best of times it’s generally not that good to take the train. The rolling stock is outdated and made for suburban journeys ; and often carriages get left off and the trains are horribly overcrowded, and it’s never possible to reserve a seat.
And that’s at the best of times. now’s the worst of times because years of under-investment have made the situation of the people who actually run the railway absolutely impossible.
Which is why, in desperation, they are on strike.
So I’m taking the bus up the A9, which is not an especially safe choice as it is notoriously the most dangerous road in Scotland to drive along.
Safety measures were pledged in 2011, but have not been acted upon.
And all this is happening because we do not have a coherent transport policy.
Just as we have no coherent health policy. And if I had been involved in an accident, there might well have been no ambulance to take me to hospital…
The accelerating pace of climate change, and the increasing risk of another pandemic, make it imperative we have both sets of policies in place.
But we don’t because our governments, like the rest of us, are caught up in the culture war between those of us trying to move society forward to a more sustainable and more just place and those who profits depend on the continuation of exploitation, injustice, and the destruction of the natural world.
And if I think about it, sitting here on my actually very pleasant and comfortable journey, it is part of a much wider and deeper and more intense culture war still.
Because the striking railway workers, and ambulance drivers, and nurses, and border staff, and teachers and civil servants… are all going on strike not just because their pay and working conditions have become intolerable.
Because behind all this there is also an urgent need for a new economics - that factors in the cost of environmental destruction and also regards workers as more than debits on a balance sheet and acknowledges the values of their skills and their labour.
And then - and this is so hurtful I can hardly bear to mention it - there are the truly dreadful scenes happening inside and outside the Scottish Parliament just now in connection with the reforms to the Gender Recognition Act.
Which really is, at the end of the day, no more than a technical issue about it making it easier and less degrading for us trans peopletochange our legal gender.
But which has along the way got muddled up with so much else.
Hatred of trans people, most obviously; but behind that, the the misogyny endemic to our society and the utterly unspeakably dreadful violence inflicted on women every day and every where.
Horrific violence and horrific suffering that points so strongly to the fact that we need to continue the painful and the difficult task of re-imagining what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a man.
But that demands courage, intelligence and imagination.
Whereas hating tans people is accessible to the meanest intelligence.
And hating us because that is exactly what we are doing….
And in the meantime, the pace of destruction quickens; and all of us in Europe are caught up in a horrible and destructive war.
Th world is turning, and change is happening, because no-one and nothing can prevent it.
But it doesn’t feel like that.
It often feels as if we are all caught in a place of stasis and helplessness.
A horrible place, mostly; and we deal with our powerless and our dread by clinging on to life as “normal” and acting as if nothing needed to change.
And that suits the authorities very well.
For it is in this situation where those in power are telling the wrong stories, are telling false stories, and are telling harmful stories tat will not save us from destruction…
That is when it is so important for artists to step up and tell better stories.
Stories of hope, stories of power.
Stories that affirm that things can be different.
“They’ll lie to you”, Ines says says to the child at the end of my INES DE CASTRO,
“They’ll tell you that I had to die. That love is not enough.
That we should not allow ourselves to dream.
They’re wrong. They’re very wrong.
They’ll tell you that they have to kill.
That they cannot avoid committing crimes.
Don’t believe them. Don’t believe them for a moment.
Remember there’s another way”.
And the child promises. She will remember. She won’t forget.
And we must remember too.