The march at the weekend in Edinburgh was there to try and convince the G8 to change trade laws to favour the poor, to attempt to make extreme poverty history.
How is that different from previous G8 meetings? Seattle? Genova? Has Blair’s government succeeded in sidetracking the debate about the legitimacy of the G8 as an organisation by making a bunch of conditional offers and fudged statements about poverty reduction, so instead of telling the G8 to fuck off, we’d start asking them to help?
I’m feeling very uncomfortable about the whole thing right now. Uncomfortable that I hadn’t really thought about it in these terms til I started musing on the state of affairs with the protestors in Scotland, and found myself thinking of them negatively as disrupting the process, rather than positvely for disrupting the process. Are we naive to think that anything will change?
Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?
I so hope that something will change. We’ve seen in South Africa that the impossible is possible if the will of the people is overwhelming. Can it happen this time? Is anything going to cause the psychotic murdering moron in the White House to recognise the need for change that might damage the billions of his oil business scumbag friends, but will ultimately save the planet? Is he ever likely to join the dots between poverty, war, climate change and US cultural imperialism?
These are dark days, blog-peoples, dark days. And here I am listening to Bruce Cockburn singing songs he wrote over 20 years ago that spell out what’s happening now.
Nothing changes.
Maybe the people smashing shit up in Scotland have got the right idea. I dunno. Answers on 100% recycled paper postcard to the usual address….