A Warmonger You Are

One face is named love. The other is named war. The name of the coin is passion — and when you stop looking at which face you're holding, you've left the outcome to chance.

We don't think of ourselves as people who wage war. Warmongers are men in rooms we'll never enter, signing papers we'll never read, sending other people's children to die in places we can't pronounce. We are ordinary people. We buy things. We go home.

That is precisely the problem.

We were so busy arguing about vaccines, immigration, which side of history we're on — we forgot to look down at the hands doing the arguing. We didn't even ask whose blood.

Nobody asks who profits from the noise when we're too busy glaring past our own reflection in our little black mirrors, scrolling past the point of sleepiness like rats on a wheel. We live the propaganda daily. We breathe it. We share it.

What are you reading? Oh? Can you send me the link?

Hmmm, interesting article. Yeah, I read the title. I'm going to send it to my mum. What's that? A few big papers? Yeah. Owned by a few billionaires? Yeah, cool. 3% independently owned? Mmhmm. Cool. Yeah, that's crazy.

Have you seen this rat eating cheese? So funny. Yeah, no. I don't really have time to read about that journalist who got shot.

Yeah, I'm busy. Give me a moment. I'm just looking at this rat.

Oh look! It's talking! It's saying "Silence has a price, and that price, as ever, is gold."

Haha. Cute.

Hey, has it ever occurred to you that you've probably paid for a human life?

No? Me neither.

Nah, a human life isn't silence. I think it's probably sold for silver. For pots and pans. For minerals. For pleasure. For land. For status… probably for not much at all.

Suicide nets exist for a reason.

You don't have to stretch the imagination too far to wonder why. Some poor woman in some country that doesn't care about minimum wage sits blackening her fingers on the inside of your shiny object, working fourteen-hour days for enough to buy peanuts to support herself and a child. Our enterprises go abroad for exactly that reason — they go where human life is cheap. We've crushed industry here and handed the factory of the world to China.

Isn't it funny that in the western world we look at the Victorian workhouses with nostalgic pity and marvel about how far we've come and then turn around and reel at the thought of sending a child up a chimney?

Industrial nations burned their way to wealth. Then we exported the factories to poorer nations. Now, facing climate catastrophe, we demand that poorer nations mine the rare earth to fuel our green revolution — using gas and oil to do it.

We turn to the financially poorer nations — who consume the least, burn almost nothing, eat meat rarely — and we make them pay first. We claim to build their roads. We pay the bosses who pay their workers the better part of nothing. We send them our garbage. We sell them crops that cannot reproduce, that they must buy again year after year, on rented land they toil. Drought comes. Famine follows. The failure of the developed world can be seen in the mass migration that is already, quietly, underway.

Anyway. Weird weather we're having for this time of year, no?

Mmm, nice ring you're wearing. Engagement? Congratulations, that rock must've cost at least a month's salary.

Erm, how much the gram for coke?

This phone is how much?!

Excuse me, how much is tea, please?

You don't actually pay for the porn? Do you?

A rude awakening for some: you're not poor because of Ukraine.

You're poor because of Apple, Amazon, and Amex. The war you've been handed to explain your empty pockets is a distraction from the hands already in them.

Funny that.

You didn't ask if. You asked how much. And someone, somewhere, answered with their life.

A warmonger you are, and a fine one too. Causing carnage in distant lands for a bit of je ne sais quoi back home. I include myself entirely — we are all downstream of an economy that runs on human suffering, and we participate in it before we've finished our morning coffee.

The question is not whether we have blood on our hands. The question is whether we are willing to look at them.

You know what? It might or might not be the end of times, but this is certainly an Empire of Avarice, in death throes at the end of its natural lifespan — and most of us too busy scrolling to notice the coffin walls closing in.

A boring dystopia some have called it.

Everyone else is calling it the fall of the west. Except the west- we’ve grown comfortable in our discomfort

Boring dystopihahaha!

Mark my words. It won't stay boring for long.