RE: Dismaland. I do not like it.

Good morning everyone :D

I really do not like the concept nor the existence of Dismaland. 

Life is a miserable boring slog as it is riddled with rejection letters, excitement over the inane and moments of quiet being our sole moment of joy within the day. I don't want to see something like Dismaland.

Our society has absolutely zero vision beyond consumerism. We have placed ourselves into shackles of debt through the creation of mortgages, student loans and high rent. Ruthless competition for low paid jobs runs rampant across our nation and a continual line of politicians telling us that things are getting better whilst our lives seem to drag along rapidly going nowhere fast. We work to cover the basic costs of living, with those costs keeping pace or sometimes extend over our income. I don't need some potentially rich prick reminding me how the yolk of my existence has long since gone rotten.

We might attend a gig, or venture out somewhere nice for a week if we're lucky or a few days. After our holidays only to return to our great grey domain and power away at work in the vain hope of escaping again if we're not laid off, replaced or called in to do extra shifts. Maybe we will see something magical on our morning commute but most likely it will be a silent affair with everyone avoiding eye contact. We know our lives head nowhere fast, we are deeply ashamed of what our society has become for we know deep down that the Empire is dead but that hatred spawned by colonialism was never truly replaced. We never replaced hate with love, we just replaced it with work and electronics and colourful products.

This is why the British get riled up by immigration, for we know our jobs pay next to nothing in real terms, we know that we are powerless to market forces and that for every job we refuse to do as the money won't meet our own ends, a migrant is more than ready to pick up that role. Is it wrong that someone can make do with less? Is it wrong that instead of fighting for them as well as ourselves, we just blame them for daring to dream or aspire? We claim to live in an aspirational society but we do not understand one another I know nothing about what you hope to achieve by the end of today and you have little clue about what it is I do. Yet each of us are inextricably linked as our tax money is collected and used to enact the machinations of mad men and mad women that dare to declare that they speak in our name whilst committing our nation(s) to acts most insane with the police acting as the brawn for this twisted brain. We know our society has long since gone rotten, we know that genuine revolution would be met with a man in black. Despite knowing thing, despite knowing how flawed and broken Democracy has become, we point the finger at the vulnerable, or the mentally ill or the refugees.

I look at Dismaland and I'm thinking "Could you just not, maybe?" . With a mental health crisis, a genuine collapse of community at hand and low wages, the last thing I need is some artist reminding me that it's all gone to heck. And if it makes us as a nation think? I can picture it now: We will think for a few moments and then swiftly move on. That's the British way. We donate a few quid to charity each month or once a year for Comic Relief and then continue committing the same acts we do every damn day that continues to extend the misery that we have become tangled up in. We'll do the bare minimum and expect someone else to take up our fight of equality, better wages, social housing or affordable homes, because "I work X to Y, I already work hard etc etc etc". A bunch of miners and factory workers once campaigned for an 8 hour day, not so we could get back to work and claim that we were doing our bit, but so that once we did some work we can get time off and genuinely do something with our precious and soon to be expired lives.

I look around and think what kind of legacy will we leave for the future and the answer is: A battered landscape, more debt than WW2 and a most odious form of consumerism that only seeks to break down social barriers so that we have another market to exploit. Our technology is moving forward but our society and the genuine soul of this nation has regressed back a century.

Right now there is a family that have to bathe in a paddling pool because our Government enacted policies that saw a disabled person evicted from a home that was converted for them to use. The fact that the genuine misery that now constitutes the basic fabric of many people's lives can be turned into something like Dismaland seems like trivalising a life that has already been reduced to a cruel mockery.

Reality is depressing as it is without some POPULAR artist hammering that point home. Banksy is already famous, I'm certain there are other artists there but people are going along to see the new Banksy thing and maybe, maybe some one else will get somewhere but this is just another stunt. Regardless of who their intended audience might be, the general public will be bombarded with stories about Dismaland because someone somewhere will be expecting it to make money. People are buy tickets to see something miserable when they need only to read about sanction related deaths. People have literally died over less than the price of a Dismaland ticket.

Life is cruel as it is.