Open Writing

One of the informing slogans of the nineteen-sixties was the cry; "Do your own thing!" It was the latest in a series of steps that had seen the dissolution of the Old Order of Society, whose first rumblings undermined feudalism in the wake of the outstanding success of English longbowmen at Agincourt in the year of fourteen-sixteen.

Surprised at their overthrow of the French Army, they were convinced of their own ability to defend themselves from their enemies independent of their feudal masters. It was the beginning of an emancipating tendency that signalled the end of feudalism, under which yeomen-serfs owed fealty to their protecting lords on pain of death.

As must all engines of social change, the quickening significance of burgeoning independence, conferred on them by the ‘Agincourt effect,’ lodged in the hearts and minds of common folk, feeding their noble aspirations.

In consideration of the restraints of time and space that forbid I should recount every pivotal moment in world history through which to spin my yarn, I will leapfrog across centuries.

During the late Middle Ages, came the elementary recognition of man as an Individual unit as separate and detached from a cog-like existence in the machinery of local and national economy. This was an important step toward establishing personal rights and freedoms.

Freedoms are not granted simply because they are recognised as being right and just. The movement in favour of them has to be large enough and vocal enough to be recognised as inevitable by those holding the reins of power, and as correct and merited by those whose histories and antecedents have rendered them unused to liberty.

Perhaps disappointment at the behaviour of the officer class during the Crimean and Great Wars was the final hurdle to be surmounted before the scales fell from the eyes of a common humanity raised in the belief that monarchs, aristocrats, squires, parsons, workmasters, magistrates, and the gentry-at-large were directly placed in their situations by The Supreme Being, and that they themselves were less authorised to be granted similar freedoms and self-expression. Indeed, if they were church-going folk they would sing:

"The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate.
God made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate."

The ruling classes who had oftimes been seen at their worst on the battlefield, seemed to invoke the ghosts of Agincourt, refreshing the notion, "They are no better than us." It was a startling revelation, and got men thinking again, and that is always a dangerous thing. The rank and file should be kept too busy, or too amused, to engage in serious thinking, because, when they do, the results are usually revolutionary and disturbing.

The world into which I was born, was a world preparing to plunge into a second Great War. Before I was five years old, the battle lines were drawn and the enemy engaged. All the paraphernalia of war that flowed back from the fields of slaughter invaded the minds of innocent, permeating my thinking and expectations.

Those days were still, in some ways, the great days of Empire when the Union flag waved over every continent. Thrilling tales of daring exploits by our soldiers in exotic places added to the picture that the British, particularly the English, were God’s favoured People, and that whatever they turned their hand to do, God would prosper it because He was one of Us!

It was all right then to be a commoner, particularly if you wore the King’s uniform and bore arms to defend life and liberty from a despicable oppressor. Being in the armed forces was the only time the ordinary man got to be well thought of as a class. Yet, the "War to end Wars" did not end wars, and one more war was necessary to rid the world of parvenu political upstarts.

Despite everyone’s best efforts, tyranny remained and remains a fact of life, somewhere in the world, for some people, all of the time. Tyrants are not only resistant, they also display the Kleenex Symptom: you knock one down, and up pops another!

When I am aged, I thought, I will be free from the alarums and discomforts of would-be-masters-of-the-universe. Rage as they might, I vowed, they shall not disturb my tranquillity again.

Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, and every other once-imperial power had relinquished their imperial grasp of other nations, and renounced their empires, swayed by an heroic current of self-determination that encircled the world.

I have witnessed the overthrow of Oriental despots; the deposition of African grandees; the disgrace of fascism as the politics of fear; the dismantling of the brutal fascism of Soviet Communism; and joined my small voice to the universal cry, "Freedom for all! Down with tyrants" raising it as an ensign for all people, everywhere.

Although the world is not yet rid of tyrants, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain totalitarianism without being labelled inhuman and archaic. The ‘Standard of Liberty’ has been lifted, and unless a nation is foolish, it will not make way for any philosophy that robs us of our right to determine what we do, and when and where we do it. That much we can decide for ourselves. However, can we?

As victims of incontinence will know, the bladder is sensitive to signals that produce the urge to pass water. A ‘hair-trigger-bladder’ can squeeze hard after a very small trigger so that thinking about turning on a tap to do the dishes or wash your hands can cause an unfortunate accident just as you arrive at a bathroom, or as you arrive home and put the key in the lock.

And so it has come to pass that one grim consequence of my decline is a climacteric loss of self-determination, as I become the unwilling victim to the "Dictatorship of the Sound of Running Water." This is, perhaps, in my case, the last tyrant to be overthrown.

Copyright © 2005

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Read more of Ronnie's stories at:

http://www.2theheart.com/author_ronnie_bray
http://www.meridianmagazine.com/voices/011024summer.html