A Tale Of Woe
So this local comes into my shop. While he's buying something, he strikes up a converation with my mum. And as it does, the topic eventually turned to inflation and the suffering everyone knows and bears.
My mum hasn't had a holiday in more than ten years. Apart from working night and day shifts, she has housework as well, plus paying for two kids in uni. Rents are going up and she doesn't know how we will make ends meet.
Our local friend says he's suffering too. He doesn't collect rent, so that's one source of income right out the window. Worse, after he's paid his car loan, and his wife's car loan, that's all their disposable income gone too. Despite having free electricity, water and lodging. Can you believe it, his wife has only housemaids, to cope with the entire house!
And the crowning glory? Imagine, he hasn't been able to take his family to Europe for five years!
I'm still young enough to get rattled by this sort of crap. Wake up, Local Man. This isn't how people are supposed to live. You didn't earn any of this. Every kickback you're getting is the result of the sweat of a subcon somewhere out there. Did you ever stop to think about them? The thousands of people who came out here in search of a better life? The people who live here and have fuck all to show for it? The men who crave their families and every night fight their demons alone, trapped in a bunkbed with ten strangers. The women who can't play with their kids because there's no room in the apartment and every patch of spare ground has been converted into a construction site. Don't you think that when a Indian officeboy watches a dance scene in a Bollywood film set in Geneva, he dreams of one day picking up a handful of snow? Of climbing to the top of a mountain and watching summer lightning making its way down the valley?
But he can't have that holiday, that hope. Everything he, and everyone else out in the Real World (TM) in Dubs does is toward subsistence, mindless, droning, monotony, aimed at keeping at bay the dreaded day when one must go home, cap in hand.
Don't we deserve that chance to dream? To be free of complaining, to not live in perpetual fear, to watch the corks pop on New Years and not think that this year might be the final straw?
Don't we deserve to be human again?
My mum hasn't had a holiday in more than ten years. Apart from working night and day shifts, she has housework as well, plus paying for two kids in uni. Rents are going up and she doesn't know how we will make ends meet.
Our local friend says he's suffering too. He doesn't collect rent, so that's one source of income right out the window. Worse, after he's paid his car loan, and his wife's car loan, that's all their disposable income gone too. Despite having free electricity, water and lodging. Can you believe it, his wife has only housemaids, to cope with the entire house!
And the crowning glory? Imagine, he hasn't been able to take his family to Europe for five years!
I'm still young enough to get rattled by this sort of crap. Wake up, Local Man. This isn't how people are supposed to live. You didn't earn any of this. Every kickback you're getting is the result of the sweat of a subcon somewhere out there. Did you ever stop to think about them? The thousands of people who came out here in search of a better life? The people who live here and have fuck all to show for it? The men who crave their families and every night fight their demons alone, trapped in a bunkbed with ten strangers. The women who can't play with their kids because there's no room in the apartment and every patch of spare ground has been converted into a construction site. Don't you think that when a Indian officeboy watches a dance scene in a Bollywood film set in Geneva, he dreams of one day picking up a handful of snow? Of climbing to the top of a mountain and watching summer lightning making its way down the valley?
But he can't have that holiday, that hope. Everything he, and everyone else out in the Real World (TM) in Dubs does is toward subsistence, mindless, droning, monotony, aimed at keeping at bay the dreaded day when one must go home, cap in hand.
Don't we deserve that chance to dream? To be free of complaining, to not live in perpetual fear, to watch the corks pop on New Years and not think that this year might be the final straw?
Don't we deserve to be human again?
posted by marwan | 7:12 AM
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