Flights of Fancy from a Mind Jailor

As I mentioned in my last blog, I have recently started working as a teaching assistant. This has simultaneously been one of the most rewarding and most frustrating decisions of my life to date. Obviously, I could use this opportunity to go off on one about how fucking awesome it is to teach a kid how to use commas properly (surprisingly awesome) or to rail against the iniquities of an education system that insists that at age 11, all children - whether they can read and write or not - should be able to identitify a metaphor as opposed to a similie (rail rail) but I'm not going to (or at least, not very much.) This blog is actually about a thought experiment. It is aimed at those who believe that the human race are inherently slavish followers of their given authorities and that because of this a society which is organised around the interests of the people who live in it rather than a disproportionately influential - and therefore priveliged - group of financial and political power-mongers.

Think back to when you were at secondary school.* Do you remember how many hours of every day were spent arguing with your teachers about the rights and wrongs of every un-written homework assignment, every incident of name-calling, every time you tried to throw a chair at another student and accidentally broke a window? Do you remember how many times the scary kid (his name was Bradley. It's always fucking Bradley) at the back of the class got up and marched out because he quite fairly believed that it really wasn't necessary for him to know the date of the invention of the Spinning Jenny?* Do you remember how loudly he slammed the door? Or, for the more studious amongst us - do you remember how many times you forged a sicknote excusing you from P.E? Do you remember when you told your physics teacher that you'd spent two an a half hours finding your way back to the science block from your violin lesson? Do you remember bribing the kid in the NUS office at sixth form college to lie about your age on your student ID? Do you remember traipsing an hour and a half across town in the rain because you had £8.25 and you needed £7.50 of it to get an ISIC card with said fake d.o.b proudly emblazoned across it?

Course you do.

I'm not trying to say that the model society would look anything like a modern secondary school (I did write the bit about the iniquities of the education system, right?) But - and here's the thought experiment - imagine if all that energy - that sheer bloody-minded teenage tenacity - was directed at the people who were *really* trying to screw you over. Imagine if, when the HR guy at your work comes round to inform you that, because you're only in the first six months of your employment, you're not going to get paid for the day you had off sick - oh, and also that the free-lance work that you did for us is now part of your job descriptiona and you won't be getting the six hundred quid that you thought you were. Imagine if you could summon that level of pure ballsy not giving a shit-ness next time you're working in a café where they take all of the credit card tips and half of the cash ones and stick it in the till at the end of the day. Imagine if you could bust it out every time you saw The Times Weekend Magazine.

Imagine if you could get that angry at the people who wrote this year's budget. And I think I know why it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen because the people who you see, face to face, aren't responsible for it, are they? Of course not. But imagine if instead of letting that anger dissipate, you simply asked - as politely as you knew how - to see the person who was responsible. Or at least the person who's next in line. And when you worked your way back through the H.R managers and the C.E.O.s and the junior ministers and the cabinet secretaries and finally got to George Osborne and he said 'there's no one there. There is no one behind me, yet I am not responsible: the system is to blame' you were allowed to say 'Fine. You have said that you are not responsible. I will be responsible for this. Me and the thousands of other poor fuckers who can't pay their heating bills any more. But that means you need to fuck off. And also, you're in detention until you die.'



*This may not work if you went to a fee-paying school.
*1764.