The Past, The Present And The Future - A New Year's Rant

I’m working on a few fictional pieces for your enjoyment and pleasure, but this week I found myself writing this for your, well, I’m not sure if enjoyment and pleasure is appropriate. Maybe for your attention is better.

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1.

It’s 2026 and in April I’ll turn 57 years old.

The future sneaks into the present without anyone really paying attention.

When my mother turned 57 she didn’t know she only had five years left. She got sideswiped by a vigorous cancer. Her future came at her like a juggernaut on the motorway after texting while driving, suddenly it was right on her and that was that. The end.

The future can be an unpredictable beast.

In the past, when my parent’s generation looked into the future they imagined things inevitably getting “better”. Their parents had fought hard for a few crumbs and they thought progress was a built-in feature of modernity. They thought the bowl would always be overflowing. When they looked into the future they sure as hell didn’t see today coming at them.

It’s like they were texting while living and suddenly today was right on them and that was that. Boom!

When I look into the future I see the past. I see the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist. I see the same reactionary forces working to take those few hard fought crumbs and place them right back on their own table.

Of course, globally, those crumbs were only enjoyed by few people, mostly those living in militarised, industrialised countries in the so-called, West. Countries that have benefited from expansionist colonial histories and ended up promoting a dangerous belief in the natural order of things. Bowls in these countries were overflowing because the rest of the planet’s cupboard was being ransacked and emptied.

But not all bowls were overflowing in the West as it hoovered up the world’s resources, because countries in the West had their internal class systems, and these systems were busily arranging to deliver cakes to the powerful few whilst dropping only crumbs on the powerless majority.

For most of time, most of the populations in the West have been exploited and enslaved, and then expected to be grateful for the crumbs they were allocated. But even so, they had it good compared to so much of the rest of the world.

But in the end, the extraordinary boundless greed of the very few inevitably overflows into war and the death as countless of the empty-bowled are forced to fight each other to perpetuate a state of aggression and violence as colonial and neoliberal policies continue to ransack the world.

My parent’s generation grew up in the period after World War 2, a strange and unusual time we called The Post War Period. A time where the population in the West experienced the apparatus of power not as a mechanism to further engorge the already sated, but used instead to distribute the cake and the crumbs a little more fairly and a little more evenly. Not fairly and not evenly, but a little more fairly and a little more evenly.

This was the period in which my parent’s generation experienced what they assumed to be normality. A period where people imagined the Enlightenment’s mythology of progress was inevitable and settled. A anomalous period in world history that deviated from the usual top-down smash and grab mania of the powered classes.

But alas, this Post War Golden Period turned out to be not such a anomaly after all. It turned out that the cake stuffing classes who were spending their time angrily aiming a juggernaught at everyone. The Golden Period was coming to an end. The useful myth of Progress was to be dismantled and normal programming was to be resumed.

At some point in the Post War Golden Period people went from holding hands to pointing fingers. The fragile Social Democracy that helped to distribute capitalism’s ill gotten gains a little more fairly and a little more evenly was to be replaced by the pointy fingered cake grabbing ideology of Neoliberalism. And in neoliberalism there were winners and losers. And apparently it was your own choice which you were. There was no system any more, no community or society, there were just individuals fighting as hard as they could for the crumbs or the cake.

And it wasn’t just economic warfare, it was psychological, philosophical and spiritual warfare, too. My mother should have fought harder to beat her cancer. She should have vigorously manifested her healthiness. But she failed. So she died. The weak will perish. It’s Darwinian, say the finger pointing cake grabbers.

And, they say, that holding hands instead of pointing fingers is a sign of weakness and has led to our precarious predicament. You should have fucked a few more people over. You should have shut up and buckled down. You make your choices and you get what you deserve, the pointy fingers cake grabbers say. Look how hard we’ve worked to achieve all this power, they say, which, to be fair, is true. Ransacking humanity and destroying the world is hard work, and they’ve done an extraordinary job.

So here we are. Today. An impending period of Western Fascism looming through the windscreen of life. Again. Boom. Sideswiped.

My children’s generation have been sideswiped by an entire class that’d been lurking by the roadside, waiting to smash into everybody and remind the weak just how weak they are. Winners and losers, buddy, winners and losers.

When my parents were young they weren’t so interested in politics. They did vote every four years like standard bearers in a pretend war, claiming membership of Left-wing parties that continually installed Right-wing policies. And they did watch the news and they did keep abreast of the slow whittling away of hand holding and community. They watched nightly reports where the gluttonous finger pointing classes told them everything was going well. They told them that Progress meant extracting, bottling, boxing and selling everything that ever was, the trees, the rivers, the seas, the animals, the minerals, the land, the people, the hopes and even the dreams, which should all have a price tag and be shelved and put up for sale to the highest bidder.

And these bidders are high alright, doped-up and spaced out on an extremist ideology of power and ego-lust that told them they were gods.

Obviously none of this is my parent’s generation’s fault. The blame should never be placed on those being whipped, they do not choose the force and frequency of the blows.

Besides, during the Golden Period no one really thought they needed to engage with politics. It was settled. There was Progress, and besides, people had lives to lead, things to buy, goals to reach, lovers to love and messages to text.

But these days, today, we all need to understand politics, my parents generation, my generation, my children’s generation, all of us need to understand politics because these days, today, we’ve finally looked through the windscreen of life and there it is again, the unavoidable juggernaut of Fascism bearing down upon us all with these pointy fingered cake grabbing classes at the wheel once again.

This means no more holding hands. This means being held by the hand, dragged along by the hand, held ever more tightly, until it’s painful. And it will get more and more painful being dragged along by these winners with their pointy fingers and powerful hands and their insatiable lust and their strangely humourless faces.

It is strange too, with these powerful classes, how seriously they take themselves, how their entitled arrogance and hatred breeds such narrow-minded pomposity and fragile humourlessness. There’s a dourness and an earnestness to fascism’s inhumanity.

The human smile is a flag of empathy and togetherness, it’s a flash of vulnerable openness that calls one to the other and say’s I see you, I know you, I am you, I share your world and you share mine.

I wonder sometimes whether the powerful classes love AI and Tech so much because it’s not just weapon of control, but because it’s the opposite of warm whimsical delight, the opposite of gentle humane kindness, the opposite of friendship, tenderness and love, the opposite of a human smile.

It’s 2026 now and in April I’ll turn 57 years old. When I look through windscreen of life I’m nervous. I don’t like what I see.

I see the rise of a fascist future and a Ragged Trousered Philanthropist past. I see the chaos of a post-truth world on the brink of some new darkness. I feel overwhelmed by the collapse of trust. And I imagine that holding hands is over and we’re to be dragged toward some humourless, dour, future of bullying, hatred and extremism in a coup designed to dismantle democracy and platform fascism. Again.

And I am confused by the fact that those who want to destroy everything are the worst of us.

How have the worst of us, with so little to offer, managed to take the most of all?

And I’m confused why their narrow-minded pomposity and hatred is accepted instead of fighting for self-aware humility and Love.

And I’m wondering why we allow these people to politicise their own internal broken emotional architecture and allow them to pretend that hatred is legitimate policy?

And I’m wondering is how much further this will go before we realise the only sustainable future is one where our relationships are horizontal, between equal hand holding humans who share our bowls, and not vertical relationships between isolated individuals begging power for a few crumbs.

I’m wondering if we, you, each of us, have the strength to apply the brakes and turn the wheel before we are side swiped by the ignorance and viciousness we all know is coming.

And I’m wondering if in 2026 we can pay attention, and look up, and reach for each others hands, and refuse to be smashed into smithereens as this insanity sideswipes us once again.