Time For Change...

What is it about the human race that compels it to continue to faff around micromanaging itself to the point of paranoid psychosis? Or treat its own kind as pawns in the abstraction of the capitalist game: disposable commodities to be dispensed with when financial transactions are complete and profit banked? Two things today have crossed my mind: the first, the insane attempt to balance the cost of electricity wholesale cost and the concomitant retail cost to the hoi polloi on an hour by hour or half-hourly basis: this at a time when my credit card payments are always late because the payee's bank still operates a two day clearance on payments, despite the fact that my bank operates a real-time service to like-minded and equipped organisations. My money leaves my account instantly - on the due date - and languishes in the system (presumably accruing interest for the target account holder) for two days, leaving me both out of pocket and due a late-payment penalty for not having been late paying. Talk about about skewed: I now have to micro-manage myself to avoid being penalised for doing things right. Tucked up like a kipper, or what? 

The second and rather more concerning thing - although still a reflection of the same mechanisms of out of control capitalism, are the disturbing reports of asylum seekers being 'housed' in slums which Dickens himself would have recognised, the kind of rotting buildings that only a Rachmanesque landlord would see fit to profit from. Leaking, dangerous buildings that shouldn't even be left standing are making profit - at taxpayers expense via our wonderfully disengaging Non Government® (it's the markets, you know) - leaving vulnerable people fleeing similarly intolerable situations in their countries of origin in just as dire a situation as the one they left. It's simply intolerable that we as a society should even vaguely consider this to be a 'right' state of affairs: we're supposed to be civilised and civilising.

It strikes me that the world is indeed full of bad people who deem it OK to treat the rest of humankind like chattels to suit their own ends - history repeats, ad nauseam. This really has to stop for our species to survive for much longer, and a good first move would be to step back and simplify the way we approach our world and ourselves. To reduce the number & frequency of interactions to a personal level and get back to a human-scale mode of managing our way through the world and accommodating one another: to notice the others involved in our world, rather than relying on the reductive and ultimately destructive methodologies of high frequency capitalist life. There's nowt wrong with taking your time over things...