Opium of the Masses?

I haven’t replaced my bike’s buckled front wheel and so I took the metro to work today. Rush hour. Hustle and bustle. 20-minute journey with a change from the yellow to the purple line.

Television screens that show a mixture of advertising and light news items hang over the station platform. Passengers’ eyes (mine too) are inevitably sucked towards the moving images. A series of ads, one an advert for mortgages. A dream house in the country appears on the screen. It is inhabited by a model shiny-toothed disease-free family (fit, successful, handsome father, fit, good-looking, successful young-looking mother, happy complex-free kids). On the drive is a sleek black 4x4. Their large lawn looks more like a billiard table than a stretch of grass. In the background is a swimming pool and a friendly dog wags its tail. I want. I want. Me. Me. Me. Desire.

A far cry from our insect-infested, falling-to-bits building where the police are called regularly because the folk on the second floor are on the verge of killing each other. Two suicides in three years and a higher number of alcoholics and God knows what other addictions. The lift spends more time out of order than in it. When it does work it smells of belched garlic and stale black tobacco. Cigarette ends lie smouldering on the lift floor, next to the pools of yellowish green spit and mucus. The inhabitants complain about their jobs, their husbands, their wives, the neighbours, taxes, dirt, the council, the government. And this is the "First World"! Undesirable. I don’t want. I don’t want. Me. Me. Poor me. Poor me! Aversion.

Advertising, the telly, the media. I think the whole world, beginning with myself, is living in a state of denial. Projections of a world that either doesn’t exist or, if it does, is just a tiny part of the whole (probably infinite) picture.

I am happy and fortunate to be alive, to love and to feel loved. I am happy to inhale and then to exhale and then inhale again.