Wrenasaurus

I’ve been thinking more and more recently on the subject of war. Weirdly, it’s been a very consistent part of my life, and something that I’ve analysed over and over again in various parts of my life.

As you probably know, I come from a military family, my father has been to active war zones, and as a result, I had an upbringing that normalised it. From my earliest memories, my dad was a man who was there for weeks at a time, but then disappeared for months on end, taken away for months at a time, our only communication being through “blueys”, the airmail letters that would sometimes take weeks to get to him. It’s so strange, knowing that I grew up in an environment that glorified this, put human conflict on a pedestal, saw it as something to be celebrated. Yet I’ve grown up with the polar opposite view of it. Back when I was a child, I was always told it was for the greater good, that we were either defending ourselves, our “glorious interests” abroad and overseas, or that we were liberating those under oppressive regimes. I don’t know at what age I realised that this was a lie, I know I was young. What I do remember is that I believed it for a period, which is why I will NEVER blame soldiers for their actions.

When fed a pack of lies, told the same bullshit over and over again until it becomes ingrained, you believe that you’re literally doing it for the sake of your family, their safety and well being. You’re doing it for your country. And I don’t blame people for believing the narrative, because it’s all the disgusting orchestrations of the ruling elite. It’s shoved down everyone’s throats, force fed to us on the TV, shovelled into us by newspapers. We hear it on the fucking radio and it’s gloried in songs. We see parades in the streets, displays on the television. And the worst bit about this mentality, the people who are drawn into it, are young men who come from impoverished areas. Just like my father. He was one of those young men. He grew up in a poor part of Middlesbrough, a town which is already falling apart at the seams, and he came from a very, very poor part of it called Park End. My father didn’t do well in school, something which I still struggle to believe because he’s such an intelligent man, but according to him, he was just a dick. His stories of being caned have a macabre kind of humour to them, his disrespect for authority is one of the rare things that he has passed onto me and one of the things that I adore him for. He may be a Tory, but no one can tell my father what to do if he doesn’t want to. Anyways, he grew up in Middlesbrough, a town which was spiralling into poverty around about the time of his childhood. Opportunities are rare, and if you were a young lad like my father who didn’t have the qualifications, there’s scant options of career choice that can provide a stable and fulfilling living.

But the army, specifically the Royal Engineers for him, offered all the things he wanted. He was already courting my mum from an early age. They were teenage sweethearts and he loved, and continues to love, the hell out of her. She had her own issues at home. Her mother had died when she was young, leaving her in a home with four siblings, all younger than her, who looked up to her as a mother figure. Her father was an arsehole, he didn’t know how to care for his family, and to add insult to injury he quickly married the most vile woman I have ever had the displeasure of meeting. Despite promising my late nana, on her deathbed, that he wouldn’t, because the woman was, and continues to be, a git. This was highlighted a few years ago when she stole over £100k from my grandad who is now riddled with Alzheimers and is in a home. So, my father wanted to rescue her, at the age of sixteen, and take her away from a home life that was slowly but surely running her into the ground.

And so, here was the appeal of the army. It’s always been shown to be a magnificent career, a way to pull yourself out of poverty, a way to see the world past the litter strewn streets of your council estate. It offered him a steady wage, adventure, a home for both him and my mum, and qualifications to help him learn a trade. He loved the idea of being part of something, of the camaraderie he would find working alongside other lads just like him. Other guys he knew were drawn in too, they egged each other on, going to the sign up together and talking about where their future days might take them. They were proud, safe in the knowledge that they would be doing something noble, something that would raise them above the people and the places that they were leaving behind.

And it’s the same today, isn’t it? You never really hear of the children of bankers going off and joining the army. Never hear of a millionaire’s spawn giving up his life of luxury to piss off to an army camp to be shouted at by some dude with a small man complex. It’s always us. Always the poor. It’s always those of us who didn’t do well in school, it’s those of us who grew up in insecurity, the threat of hunger always plaguing our existence, who are drawn to the fold of the military. It’s those people who have no other options, who didn’t do well in school, who were told that because of this they would never amount to anything, who are the first to be fed to war. They’re the ones who are sent into the battlefield, sent out to die, to lose their friends and to come back emotionally fucked. They’re the ones who are expendable. Sent to protect their country and their betters, under the pretence of defending their family and country.

And it’s class fucking war. And it’s only one head of the hideous hydra that is this social warfare. There’s so many aspects of it, so many things that people don’t even consider, the constant oppression of the poorer classes by their wealthy counterparts, that for some reason has been completely normalised and accepted by us. We don’t even know it’s happening most of the time, we have grown so apathetic that we just accept it, think that it’s our lot in life and it’s just the way things are.

Bull-fucking-shit.

For some reason, somewhere down the line, we forgot what it was like to hold those above us to account. They’ve lied to us, cowed us into believing that somehow, we cannot live without them, that we cannot go on living, cannot exist without the fat-cat bosses, the extraordinarily rich corporations and the political elites giving us jobs and incomes that don’t even make fucking ends meet. They have us believing that, somehow, they are doing us a favour by giving us just enough to literally not die, as we feed their empires, funnel money that we have made for them, into offshore bank accounts so that it can’t even go back into the meagre social tax contributions that we have in place.

This. Is. Bullshit.

And I’m so bloody baffled by the whole thing. We outnumber them so fucking much. There are literally billions of us, we all struggle. We have people who work forty hours a week who cannot afford to pay their bills. We have single parents working multiple jobs just to make sure that their children have clothes on their backs, and yet they still have to pay for childcare. We have elderly who have to choose between eating and heating their homes. People are working well into their sixties, the years that they should be able to kick back and rest, safe in the knowledge that the disproportionate taxes that they have paid will keep them going in their retirement. An NHS whose funds are being stripped and sold to private pockets.

And all this time we have fucking Jeff Bezos earning over SIX FUCKING BILLION a month. A fucking month. That’s approximately $8,961,187 an hour. The average Amazon worker makes around $28,466 a year. That’s 315 times his averages workers annual pay in a fucking hour. His workers would have to work 597,412 hours, or 24 hours a day for about 68 years, just to earn what Bezos makes in one hour.

And all this time, his employees are given off the wall, bat-shit insane targets to hit, they have minuscule break times, work place injuries are common, toilet breaks are numbered and timed. They are treated like commodities, expendable, sacked for the smallest of discrepancies. They are treated inhumanly, nothing more than a tool of which Bezos uses to grow his vast, unfair wealth. He lines his pockets on the suffering of his workers. They are nothing to him. They are not a person, not a name, not a sentient being with thoughts and feelings who are just trying to make a living. They are a tool. And it’s the same everywhere. Every single greedy, vile little capitalist bigshot has the same mentality, the same psychopathic and narcissistic traits where they see us as nothing more but pawns, easily thrown aside if it means they can swell their bank accounts.

What the utter fuck are we doing? How the hell have we allowed this to happen?

Thanks for reading this so far guys, sorry it’s only a short multi-parter. I wanted to try out my new laptop and fuck me, I’ve blasted this one out 🙂 Next time I’ll touch on the rest of the Hydra’s heads, because it gets so much worse. I’ll go into detail on the NHS, the police and how they are nothing but a shield for the elite. I’ll touch on politicians, the royal family, the bankers and more.

Fuck me, this could be a full series.