Down on Global Street

The world is finite. It is like a house full of people living in different rooms. Each room has slightly different standards of behaviour, but the one thing they all agree on is that the house belongs to the owner.

Because this landlord gives nothing in return for his rent, and because there is nowhere else to obtain the rent-money except within the house, those living there must devise ways of obtaining more than they need for themselves, in order to meet their rent. But in a finite world, filled to capacity, one man's surplus is anothers' shortfall.

In such a house, only two things can give. Either your neighbours' share must be taken, or your own furniture and fittings must be ripped up and sold to the highest bidder, regardless of your future need of them.

What a terrible place to live! An atmosphere heavy with suspicion, mutual distrust and helpless self-interest must pervade this house. The occupants of each room view their neighbours with a jaundiced eye, knowing that to display weakness will invite attack and ruin - whilst within each room, the whole process is repeated in microcosm, as all vie for a higher, more secure resting place upon a dungheap heaving with fear and misery.

When those at the top of the pile in each room are vilified by their compatriots, they turn and point to their neighbours across the landing, saying, "Look! It is their fault! If they bought more of our wonderfully cheap washing machines and stopped flooding our markets with their underpriced spin-dryers we'd all be better off!". Or else they cry: "If you tightened your belts more and took less wages, we could make our spin-dryers even cheaper than theirs! We must be more competitive!" Identical cries can be heard in every room.

So the hard-pressed roomates mutter amongst themselves about the price of soap, and curse the dark-skinned families living in the basement, saying if they didn't keep having so many kids, they'd have enough of their own soap and then they wouldn't be coming up here stealing our jobs by doing the washing up for next to nothing..... And so it goes.

Meanwhile each week the landlord, who luxuriates in a penthouse suite in the attic, sends down his agents to collect the rent due. Of course, the full force of the law makes sure any defaulters are punished, and in extreme cases, evicted, R.I.P. After all, nobody can expect to live in his house for free. But the inhabitants are way too busy struggling with their immediate problems to stop and wonder where all this rent goes, or why they should even be paying it.

They have far, far more important matters to attend to. For here is a new inflation demand from the landlord, announcing yet another rent-rise, and there is bad news from the laundry room, whose `mad dictator' has just brutally annexed the broom-cupboard, where most of the soap in the house comes from, threatening to bring everybody's washing machines to a standstill. The papers and the TV are full of people talking about how it is our democratic duty to liberate the broom-cupboard, how we must defend our freedom (to the death if need be), by attacking those evil madmen in the laundry room - and are we not fully justified, for what right have they to stop us earning a living and paying the rent?

"But when the sky darkens and the prospect is war
Wha's given a gun and then pushed tae the fore?
Aye, an' expected to die for the land of our birth
We who've never owned one handful of Earth"

Wake Up!


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