In a culture of greed, those who have the least are the greediest. After decades of hype, we have fuelled an expectation of plenty in everyone. We have skewed it, too, into the illusion that plenty equates with designer tops and trainers.
Add to that hungry ignorance, the sense that there is no real way out but consumption (have more, get more, take more), and we have a people who believe the formula for success is to dress yourselves up like some rich fool, no matter how you acquire the trappings, and suddenly you’re somebody.
Pile on the requirement by those (those of us) who can somehow say we have crossed the somebody threshold, who can maybe pull the ladder up behind us, to keep that gibbering mass of scapegoats at bay. Then we have created a recipe for disaster.
All we have done now is tightened the screw on the tank. Those mad buggers have nothing at stake, nothing left to lose. We have taught them to take the things of value for themselves. However misguided, that comes down to cheap shirts and TV sets. That’s why the carpet shops get hit while the banks are left alone. These people aren’t anarchists, political activists nor subversives. They are the criminal mad, driven there by our collective social disease. They are the bottom-of-the-heap consumers denied fulfilment now they are strapped for cash by dwindling jobs, slashed benefits and a declining black economy.
We’d do well to remember that we’re witnessing cold turkey, the sweats and tremors that go along with acute withdrawal of the drug of ‘stuff’. Them upstairs are intent on putting up the shutters but the basement is on fire. Those of us on the first floor are bound to suffer but we really should have been wise to the game. Someone should have been thinking about those we had left to wallow in the mess we left down there. Maybe we did, but that was pest control. Now the rats are on the march, waving their looted hi-fis and wearing their faux Gucci tees.
When we look in their eyes, that is when we will realise they are not rats after all. These are the undead. Lifeless but animated, they are factory fodder bereft of factories, thieves blindly robbing each other, the destitute hoarding petty hand-outs, the vulnerable preying upon themselves. Look in their eyes and you will see nothing. This is the zombie attack no-one prepared for; the vampire, dying of pernicious anaemia, snarling at our throats.
© BH 2011
Just had to get it off my chest.
