Open Writing

I am a peace loving man. I have been for some years now since I outgrew the dusty days of my turbulent youth and took stock of what anger contributes to the world.

My ventures into politics involved serious discussions with my friend Eric "The Red" Nowell, trying to read some badly printed books on Dialectical Materialism from a communist book shop in London, trying to attend a lecture in the Huddersfield Labour Rooms in Arthur Waite’s younger days to hear Barbara, not then exalted to the peerage, Castle MP, and founding the ill-starred and short-lived Social Freedom Movement.

I went to the Barbara Castle meeting, found a seat, and waited, and waited, and waited. The start time came, then went, and as it went so did I. If they could not, I told myself, begin when they said they would and did not bother to offer an explanation, my short fused anger set off the ticking bomb that was my patience, and I departed.

I had no real flirtation with Conservatives because they were all too well dressed and I was highly conscious of my place in the social order.

I looked at the Liberals but they were few and far between, and so I became a free floating socialist with no particular views about anything. I was from the lower middle working class, and I knew my place.

I instituted the Social Freedom Movement and the next day wrote a stiff letter to the secretary of ‘The Lord’s Day Observance Society’ and got a stiff reply from him asking uncomfortable questions for which I had no answers and was too tired to make some up. He was a very famous man but I have forgotten his name along with the names of most of the boys and girls with whom I attended Spring Grove school.

The Social Freedom Movement never achieved national or international prominence. We had three members. I was one, my brother Arthur was another, and his friend Tiny, a very big lad, who, during my poetic starving-in-a-garret phase, succoured me with tins of ham and cartons of Jacob’s Club biscuits that he had liberated from the Co-op, was the third and final member.

Arthur and Tiny were surprised when I told them they were members, but I had the wild look in my eye, and hand written membership cards with their names and numbers on so they grinned and said "Thanks!" I have often wondered if they were sincere.

I met Eric Nowell a couple of times after our initial meeting and he had changed his politics, become a father, and was about to be charged and imprisoned for his paternity. When I reminded him that he used to be extremely democratic in his views, he seemed very surprised.

Politically, there was nowhere left to turn and so I abandoned my political career, convincing myself in an ignoble act of self-justification that I was above politics. It sounded like a magnificent gesture. On the lips of a noble person, it would have been tinged with grandeur, but on the lips of a ne’er-do-well it was just more balderdash for the privy midden.

When I hit America, I discovered that politically I was somewhere just outside the ballpark. Americans are a wild bunch that thinks nothing of telling you exactly who God wants you to vote for although their justification for the divine imperative relative to the qualities of the candidate lacks substance.

The trouble is that no one can find a consensus as to what it is that God really wants in American politics, so we are faced with a battery of interpreters who direct us in 360 different directions at the same time. No one sees the incongruity of this because their eyes are not on the ball, but on the spin machines that spew out a continuous stream of misinformation.

Canvassing is not an opportunity for the candidate to set forth his manifest, but is used to blast the candidate’s opponent with high explosive invective that might have some truth to it, but which is more often mendacious prevarication.

Most of all I dislike the malevolence, malice, and open animosity with which opponents address and describe each other. Lie follows counter-lie, truth is sacrificed on the altar of expediency, and principles go to the dogs.

Dogs being highly moral creatures have nothing to do with political principles and toss them back, hoping that some politician somewhere will make good use of it. Fortunately for the dogs, they don’t do follow-ups, so they are spared the disappointments that we humans must continually bear.

This year, the presidential election is on the second of November, and then the votes are cast and the whole thing will grind slowly down to a halt, the post-election partying will run out of steam, spin galas will run on for a few weeks, and political pundits, of which there is no shortage, will say "I told you so," or "That’s what I really meant when I said …. "

And somewhere in the shadows, a man with haunted dark-bagged eyes will sip from a short glass rattling with ice cubes and mutter through his five days stubble, "I wuz robbed!" Then American politics will settle down to bar room arguments and vicious e-mails representing the opposition, whoever they are, as Devil’s spawn. Two years later, it all begins again with, perhaps, different principals, but the same script.

Not being a citizen, I don’t get to vote. But I cast my non-existent vote for truth, honesty, integrity, responsibility, and rationality, because I firmly believe that when these qualities are found in those who engage in the political process, however wide their differences might be, issues will be discussed and weighed in an atmosphere of peace, and I vote for peace.

Copyright © 2004 Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED