WORDS: Mike Cow

1 year ago today, the genocide on Gaza started, do not get it twisted, that is what it is, a genocide, you can stick your flowery language like ‘collateral damage’ clean up your back eye.

500 children were slaughtered by Israel and not one government lifted a finger to intervene, not one.

I don't see the memorial for those children today? Where is the 'We will remember them' clatter all over social media? Are their lives worth less than the people murdered on 7/7?

It's almost as if the mainstream media is designed to programme our responses to events via a series of emotive 'beats', which serve the agenda of those who seek to keep us enslaved and perceive that those with the same passport as 'us' - a piece of paper essentially - somehow have lives that are worth more than children with brown skin in Gaza.

Is it any wonder that desperate people, whose families have all been wiped out via arms our government have sold to their enemies then decide to blow up buses and machine gun beaches filled with holidaymakers?

Have we forgotten the children playing football who were murdered by bombs, playing on the beach in Gaza? Is dying by bomb somehow a death less worthy of ‘popular’ attention than bullets?

Are some lives worth more than others?

I'll start to take this gnashing and wailing and outpouring of 'grief' seriously when it's proportionate, consistent and recognises that ALL lives matter.

It was a year ago today that I decided that I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing, so I decided to walk 500 miles to fundraise for Medical Aid for Palestinians. It wasn’t just the deep sense of grief, and indeed shame, I felt because of those people who were murdered, as the government we elected stood by and allowed one of our allies to murder children. It was the outpouring of grief, and palpable desperation from friends and family, both on and offline that I wanted to challenge in a positive and a PRACTICAL way.

Don’t ever feel helpless, don’t ever feel like you can’t do anything about something, don’t ever feel alone.

Fastforward, 1 year on, saliently we have George Osbourne’s ‘Emergency Budget’, on the very day that poor people were attacked in Gaza, left murdered, and strewn around the landscape like expendable pieces of meat. Less than, sub-human, worth little. The forgotten.

For the first time in my life, a budget may profoundly affect me, and my life. I’m still not back at work fully after walking those 500 miles, I ruptured tendons in my foot doing that walk, I knew something was wrong in the final week as I thought my left foot was drenched as I walked along, I stopped, took my boot off and my foot was dry. Weird I thought, when I put my boot back on and continued walking, I could feel a squelch. “Fuck it I thought, everything hurts anyway, I’ll deal with this when I get home.”

I walked on it for the final week doing 100 miles to the finish and fed myself painkillers like a goose.

I’m still injured now, 1 year on from Gaza, 9 months on from the walk, in a lot of pain, this budget is going to affect me, for the first time in my working life, and this could really fuck me. I claimed tax credits to see me through, kept my business ticking over and delivered work that I could do whilst being ferried around by friends (what would I have done without them?) moved back in with my parents (thank god for them, would I have been homeless otherwise?).

I’m a Director of my own company for fucks sake, there but for the grace of god go I eh. Aye well, god’s grace isn’t going to save me now, here I am, in it, my savings decimated, put aside for a ‘rainy day’, my ability to work stymied, ‘god’s’ grace isn’t going to save me now. Not in this imposed culture of ‘rugged individualism’, fuck everyone else eh. Fuck em they say, and people swallow that like a posh Faberge cock, fashioned by Julian Fellows and the writing team of Downton Abbey which dispenses pearly white beads of grace and favour direct from the main vein into the greedy mouths of a populace conditioned to hate via Benefits Street and the perception that they aren’t a couple of wagepackets away from it.

I’m one of those people, not a posh lickspittle cum guzzler, never that, I’m one of those people just a few wage packets away from Benefits Street, well more than a few, I’m not daft, I saved up a good wedge of emergency money, I’m self-employed, I’d be stupid not to, well that’s gone, it’s been 9 months. I couldn’t have foreseen it would take this long.

And I’m one of the ‘lucky ones’. I have family who have taken me in and fed me. Not everyone has that, I feel blessed, truly blessed.

What about the people whose tax credits are getting slashed today with no family? Work harder? Where are the fucking jobs? Even if you can find one chances are it’s not a living wage and/or it’s a zero hours contract so they’ve got you by the balls, they’re not shy of reminding you that if you don’t like it there’s millions of people just like you willing to drink the ever decreasing droplets of posh tatty watter which tastes horrible, makes you feel like you want to scrub yourself, but gives you a subsistence lifestyle. Barely.

And I’m one of ‘lucky ones’.

When this injury is over (I don’t even know when that is yet), I can pick my business up where I left off, contact my clients, indeed I already have, I’ve booked a job in in mid-August, don’t even know if I’ll be ‘Fit for work’ but I’ve done it. Why? Because I’m fucking as skint as I’ve ever been in my adult life so I fucking HAVE TO. Is that ‘hard working people’ enough for you Osbourne you fucking glim?

In the time it has taken to write this, Housing benefit has been removed for 18-21 year olds by George Osbourne in this budget.

Holy fucking shit man, i know people who would have been homeless without this. By 'this', i mean the fund we have all paid into, for when times are hard.

OUR FUCKING MONEY.

It's okay though, maybe the bankers who we bailed out will let people stay on the bigger yacht they bought with;

OUR FUCKING MONEY.

Its one year on from Gaza, and this is economic genocide. Over there is over here.

One love. FTDCH.