Protest

I think it's safe to say that, more often than not, I make some shocking decisions. One of which was the decision to hop the fence of a piece of university property, run toward at least 30police officers who were surrounding an occupied building, and end up in a&e with a haematoma after being struck by a stray baton. All in the name of a peaceful protest. 

Consequences always outway the benefits in these kind of things, I have found. I only had to be exposed to some real injustice in the form of a film (called 'precious') and a first hand intervention with an abuser at work to realise that the throbbing pain in my leg could have had much more significance. The only hope I now cling to is that my children might be interested to find out that their dad was a revolutionary, in the most bazaar of senses, for a less that revolutionary cause. 

The upside to this literal pain in the leg, is that I now have an excuse to hobble around, go out for lunch everyday, repeat the same old heroic story in repetition and just generally act like a pensioner. I even made a formal complaint at work about the continuously 'out of order' lift. After all one just can't work in these conditions! 

Today, the coldest day of the year (so far), was a day of basking in my blatant ignorance. My training labelled 'education for children in care' sounded like a sentence plucked from a lullaby with design to send a crowd to sleep. It wasn't long before I happily became aware that this was a serious, moving and challenging topic- for which I am dying to share with anyone who wants to buy me a coffee. In short, the way the education system is currently designed (by the traditional educationalists for a traditional education) not one person from a care background can get to university. Ah- because they can't afford it? No, far from. Merely because while everyone who has had a peaceful childhood has developed near enough perfectly from age 4 to 16 ready for college or sixth-forms, the child in care has a deficit of at least 2 years behind (in social, physical, emotional development). So whilst we suggest 'maths just isn't for them, let's get them on a vocational course' we don't see that in two years time they may turn out to be a maths genius!

Is it me, or has this entry turned into a bit of a protest in itself? It probably doesn't help that, since finishing Huxleys most famous book, I am too often being preoccupied by the wisdom in his own literary activism. 
Want to know what's playing on my might right now? O
  '...Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way–to depend on no one–to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man–that it is an unnatural state–will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …' 

There. I told you it was deep. Anyone got any books on comedy? 

[Quote taken from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, chapter 17, p232].