The Punk Heart Of A Swedish Woman Smouldering With Love.

How to shine in this world of darkness

Photo by Alp Ancel on Unsplash

This week I have another poetic rant for you. This is part story, part tirade, part plea. A love letter to the world perhaps. A reminder of who we really are if we dare to look deep enough. Hope you enjoy this one whether you listen or read :)

To listen press the arrow below. To read scroll on down to the text.

---

If you’d like to help my rebel writer’s heart to keep beating press the button below

---

1.

Anna was ten year’s old when she first saw a kid in tartan trousers, safety pins and a mohawk flipping off the world and thought, I want a piece of that action.

Anna was a skinny little kid living in small town 1982 Sweden where everyone was straight-jacketed into their roles. Scary older kids in Stockholm could be punks but ten year old girls from small towns could not. Not even gutsy ten year old’s who were desperate to shake up the world and look cool doing it. Not even perceptive ten year old’s with natural born rebellious punk hearts beating with love in their chests. So Anna had to make do with a nice haircut, a warm jacket and sensible shoes.

Most kids just shrug their shoulders and accept the world is policed by adults terrified of individuality and difference. A few kids think Fuck You and get a mohawk. And some kids, like Anna, furiously smoulder away in their nice haircut, warm jacket and sensible shoes waiting for their chance to break free from the social straight-jacket and shine.

Anna was a patient smouldering rebel and I knew exactly how she felt. She didn’t want to kick the world to pieces, the world was already in pieces, she wanted to kick it back together again. I know this because I felt exactly the same.

When I was ten I lived in the shadow of two towering empires. Instead of punk our peripheral islands was subjected to a stream of barely disguised British and American imperialism, racism, sexism and violence in the form of TV sit-coms, soaps and series. Late 1970’s New Zealand had the Queen and JR Ewing and absolutely no anarchy.

Our TV role-models were two-dimensional gun toting tough guys who made snap decisions and drank whisky. They were cops and cowboys and oil men in constant conflict with each other and themselves. Calculating men maximising their advantage and competing for wealth and power. Behind these men were ultra feminine women sexually attracted to and competing for the most powerful and most successful men. There were big cars, big tits and big hair and the biggest dick won it all.

My ten year old mind couldn’t make sense of any of it. I couldn’t understand these violent racist drunken men obsessed with money and land who placed the value of cars or cows or oil wells above human life. I was scared of these emotionally stunted men barred from expressing three quarters of their emotional spectrum, especially love and gentleness and kindness and compassion. I knew there was something desperately wrong with these people and I knew that eventually I was supposed to become one of them.

I didn’t want to be anything like these psychopath oilmen or cowboys or the strange snivelling uptight British gents. I didn’t want to gulp whiskey in violent bars or sip port in velveteen gentlemen’s clubs. These strange broken men were destroying everything that didn’t look and act like them, massacring beautiful and precious humans seemingly for fun. When I saw the film Little Big Man I cried my eyes out. I wanted to be an Indian. I wanted to fight off the invader and reclaim my dignity, I wanted to ride bareback with feathers and face paint. I wanted to resist the stupidity and flip off the world like a punk kid on the streets of Stockholm.

At ten I came to realise I was a radical outsider in this broken world ruled by the voracious lust of the Queen and JR Ewing. I was a kid on the wrong side of a social power system destroying everything that didn’t surrender to the violent, sexist and racist power.

At ten I knew about power. At least the power of love. I had been bewitched by our 15 year old goddess neighbour for a third of my life. She was smart and funny and cool, she could run like the wind and kick down trees and she smelt like wild flowers and fresh bread and she read a magical thing called novels. And when she happened to glance over the fence in my direction with her deep brown eyes I knew I was alive, oh man, shaking and terrified and electrically alive. She was the most extraordinary human being.

But my ten year old self also knew that this world was ruled by the Queen and JR Ewing and this powerful little goddess neighbour had to transform into one of those infantilised TV women.

There was something deeply broken in this hierarchical world dominated by emotionally retarded maniacs desperate for money and I felt it in backwater New Zealand and Anna felt it in small town Sweden.

We were two kids on either side of the planet staring at a future without our names on it, two punk-hearted kids in proverbial face paint streaked with tears as the Queen and JR Ewing blasted everything that didn’t look like them to Kingdom Come.

2.

Life never rests, everything changes, and as the years passed something strange began to happen. Anna and I reached our early twenties and a peculiar fresh wind blew around the world. The Queen and JR Ewing suddenly seemed old fashioned, fuddy-duddy, brash and obvious. Their chokehold on self expression appeared to loosen. Identity became political and people dared to express themselves in new and alternative ways. Doors usually slammed in people’s faces seemed to creak open and inclusion slowly became a valid talking point. There was change in the air.

Questions were raised about power and privilege, conversations about minorities and alternative lifestyles appeared on mainstream media. It seemed as if terrible truths were being confronted as finally the day of reckoning arrived for all this bullying and racism and sexism and violence. It seemed like, just maybe, the powers that be were realising that this glorious short life was more complex and beautiful than the Queen and JR Ewing ever realised.

As long as you didn’t look too closely. As long as you didn’t peer into the darkest places and actually pay attention, it seemed like a new life was beckoning as people finally looked beyond their fear-stricken societies and started imagining real alternative futures.

But of course those two psychopaths, the Queen and JR Ewing, had no intention of disappearing into the night quite so easily. Not when there’s money to be made. And there’s always money to be made. At any cost. At every cost. Of course there was a price to pay for all this so-called new found faux-freedom because faux-freedom doesn’t come cheap. The price of faux-freedom is real freedom itself.

The truth was things weren’t changing very much at all. There was the pretence of change. A decorative shift. The powerful forces that ruled the world encouraged the charade that they cared more deeply, but the truth was they cared even less. People were being reduced from cultural beings to economic beings in a world dominated by markets and the only thing that mattered was each person’s relationship to the economy. A new global social power system was being built where anything could be purchased by anyone as long as they had cash or a credit card. Especially a credit card.

The world was becoming a debt ridden supermarket where you could buy anything you wanted as long as what you wanted didn’t actually fulfil any genuine need, as long as what you wanted was the product of a complex supply chain that enriched a group of ultra political power players, the new gods, the billionaires.

It was the Dawning Of The Great Inequality where the Queen and JR Ewing’s single-minded mentality hosted a race to the bottom in a global self-service super market stuffed with billions of newly formed craving entitled consumers desperate to satisfy their every desire. A world where you could now be a punk or wear feathers in your hair, it didn’t matter because no one cared as long as the supermarket was kept open 24-7.

Welcome to the death of community and the rise of the insatiably hungry individual starving for an industrially produce individuality.

Welcome to the final decoupling from the future in a thrashing fit to extract the very last of everything from a burning and choking planet.

Welcome to the end game where the rich and powerful set themselves a course to become even richer and more powerful and the rest of the world was left to drown in the rising tide.

3.

The painful tragedy of our current era of extraordinary engineered inequality is that showing Love is now the true mark of a rebel heart. You don’t need tartan trousers, safety pins and a mohawk these days, you just need kindness and decency to be a rebel. Wealth and privilege thrives on inequality and the rich have once again abandoned goodwill and decency to live red in tooth and claw like predators spreading death.

Ten year old Anna knew in her bones there was something wrong with the world and 50 year old Anna still tries to kick the world back together because the Queen and JR Ewing are still tearing it apart. Now we’ve got the internet spewing a stream of imperialism, racism, sexism and violence as the two-dimensional gun toting tough guys fly around in private jets and build tech companies and manipulate entire governments to turn everybody against everybody. Now we’re all Indians with all of our faces streaked with tears as the cowboys destroy everything that doesn’t look and act like them and continue on blindly massacring beautiful and precious humans seemingly for fun. And my 56 year old mind still can’t make any sense of it all.

But I do know that this glorious short life is more complex and beautiful than these violent, sexist, racist fools can ever comprehend and I do know that in these dark times my rebel punk heart beats as strongly as it ever has as I watch Anna making her way through the world.

In these dark times the Queen and JR Ewing are nurturing a terrible child, a movement of man-baby fascist fantasists bleating bullshit from the laps of billionaire babysitters who whisper nothing but evil into their naive little ears. These stunted anger-mongers are screaming their barely disguised imperialism, racism, sexism and violence at the top of their lungs as they whistle up fascism to guard dog their global greed.

And great swathes of society just seem shrug their shoulders and accept a world policed by broken adults terrified of individuality and difference.

But not Anna. Not that skinny little kid from small town Sweden.

I watch her laugh at the glittering trinkets offered as compensation for her humanity, really, she’s says, you want my eternity in exchange for a minute? I watch her stand nose to nose with the violent strangulation of the imagination and instead of throwing confused fists she bravely dreams up extraordinary futures far beyond the grasp of the Queen or JR Ewing. I watch her refuse to infantilise herself for the shallow ego trip of an approving gaze from wealthy and power as her rebel heart offers love and compassion in the face of cruelty. And I see in fifty year old Anna the power of the eternal child shining with Love and righteous rebellion and I am made strong myself as finally I can make sense of something in all this madness and in my own warm jacket and sensible shoes I too smoulder away with rebellion love.

Find your rebel heart my friend and shine in this world of darkness.

---