I remember in a period of unemployment years ago they would provide enough money for acquiring a suit for interviews. Unfortunately my employment prospects were as an adventure instructor. The UK government paid for me to face a Force 10 gale in the Cairngorms in goretex comfort. As far as I know that is the sum total of any benefit I've ever applied for and received having been protected from the cold to this day!
However they would equally have let me starve in the street when I was so sick I could neither work nor access benefits, and now I'm living in the paperwork bardo not fitting anyone's box in anyone's country, I'm not sure I'm entitled even to be a refugee as I have a passport, for all it's worth. I might use it one day for the local embassy to extract me from a predicament if that still is possible nowadays. Or do they just pay someone to push you out the helicopter? Turns out learning to become a survival instructor was possibly the wisest move I ever made. After all banking, law, politics and pharmasuiticals has become a trumped up world of gangsters, and I'm inclined to hold people's welfare in the highest regard.
Once upon a time none of us needed a piece of paper to 'belong' somewhere. Now we need all sorts of pieces and whenever we can't get them we lose rights, become ineligible to have a car, a home, a country... Now we have to pay for these pieces of paper, some people pay with their lives as they have no other option and this whole system is held up by stony faced bureaucrats who have no interest in our personal well being and people who profit from other's misery.
What should have happened in situations of profiting by pushing refugees into detention is jail for the politicians and intermediarieswho were making a lot of money for every refugee they put in detention. In the USA it's become a business to jail people... people get paid per head. IN Germany perfectly good families are having their children taken away to 'fill' beds in state childrens institutions.
There's a point at which bowing our heads to the so called 'law' becomes senselessand pursuing the next N166 form or whichever ludicrous papyrus hoop you have to jump through to be in the good books of the local pharoah. I don't like the local pharoahs I've decided. Having sincerely felt for a long time, that they don't like me. I don't know why they don't like me. Is it because my life hasn't conformed, not by my choice or theirs?
You don't always have a lot of choice over the direction your life takes. For me it was an uphill sturggle from the word go. Now I've reached a sort of quasi platform of stability of my own making, having shunned the circus parade long enough to hear my own thoughts. I've been trying to find out what the hoops were I needed to jump through. I'd moved country again, by action of Life's Default button - it wasn't a choice, and have a new Pharoah who happens to speak French and Eurozonian. Evidently neither of which I understand, especially Eurozonian. The Eurozonians, of which I do not include myself even though I am technically included without my own volition, are getting it in the neck at the moment. Mainly as I understand it for putting the squeeze on all their member countries. And ordinary folks suffering because of 'sovreign debts'. They're saying we should bail out the indebted, but I am thinking probably turfing them out would be wiser. I expect none of the ordianry Greek citizens did anything differently than try and keep a roof over their heads and food in the belly's of their families, and keep running a vehicle. No the people who have nicked all the money, the theives, the highwaymen, the bandits and gangsters are the CEO's, the shareholders, the politicians, the bankers, the law makers and their protectorate, the police and the military, None of whom I personally have a problem with, but collectively have a lot to answer for. Oh wait a sec, actualy President Sarcozy, it could be personal with. As he's the one who scrapped a scheme for people like me arriving in France not having paid enough insurance in the UK to fit their system here and be allowed to exist as a person.
I am person non-grata here, through no fault of my own. I blamed myself for a long time until I really realised that I have been sick, haven't been able to breathe and would be dead had I not fought as hard as I did. when I began to see my life through glasses untinted by self judgement and the devalueing looks the stony faced bureaucrats and family gave me, I realised I've never done anything wrong. I haven't broken any laws. It seems I'm being persecuted literally for trying to breathe. And for a long time of trying to fit the system; working two jobs for no income (you don't get paid for several weeks), or one job full time 7am till 11pm seven days a week for £25 a week... (see becoming an adventure instructior) OR save up a deposit on a place and then been made jobless because the entire company closed down... made homeless because the landlord decided to do a refit, or the landlord walked round with no underwear on and then got arrested for tax evasion... You get the picture... All the while trying to fill out this form and that form and juggle P60's and P45's.
A person should not have to be a lawyer or a finance wizard to function in society. That's not a society, it's a hedgefund for lawyers and financiers. People don't view the sort of persecution I've experienced as such. I didn't either, I thought I had 'rights', and a future and access to education and so on... That's bollocks.
You only have rights if you can jump through the right hoops or have a Pharoah in the family.
I come from a family of non Pharoahs. Our peasant blood is soaked into the earth all over Europe. All my Great grandfathers died in WW1. My grandmother and aunt were killed in the Blitz. I lived longer than my own grandmother. We once owned the little Lyons Tea houses in the UK but a partner one day came into the office and literally stole all the deeds and money and ran out the door... right from under the nose of my now completely down and out ancestor. Another worked as a drill instructor at Buckingham Palace, they were a snooty lot, hifalutin... off to the opera in ballgowns etc, he had 5kids from his first marriage, 5 with my grt grt gran and then had an affair with his wife's sister, had another five children and died of TB. You don't plan for this sort of thing in life... These two women suddenly had fifteen children and no money, so my grt gran went into the workhouse along with her siblings. So runs the racket of fortune.
I have reached the point of being extremely tired of hoop jumping. I'm not sure I can look at another piece of paper even if it means I can get out of the paperwork bardo, the in betwen, the right-less limbo you find yourself when you haven't got enough points, insurance, credit or stamps, to give you access to basic human rights. I am truly in the paperwork bardo and not sure if I want to leave it. It's like the time I found I was homeless, incredibly I didn't die... I didn't cease to exist, I suddenly inherited everywhere as my address; and nowhere... in the eyes of the law... I'm not sure I want to share their myopia any more. It's a heartless cold sort of existence... where those with passports who share your citizenship are human and those without are 'illegal immigrants'. Where those with credit, are upstanding citizens and those without are valueless.
I'm sorry but we all have value. We're inherently born with it. We have natural unalienable rights that came with our beating hearts, and our barefooted ancestors who drank the cool waters of this earth. My value is in no way indicated or chosen or reduced or enlarged upon by anyone else, My value is not measured in pounds, dollars or euros. Now currences are of division and have no honour. They only seem to shine with deceit. The truest currency, more solid than any metal, is humans helping humans to survive, as we did for thousands of years, in families and clans. Each of us with a purpose, and a future. I used to want to become something. I was forever inadequate. I tried so hard to improve myself and be 'better'. And the 'world' replayed the message of my inadequacy, and hollywood superstars paraded their achievements, like glittering flag bearers I could never catch up with. So I switched channels.
If you imply I am inadequate in anyway you'll find I will not be listening to you. I will have thrown my lot in with the animals, I'd rather chance it, on the wing, flit from tree to tree, or nose around the edges of towns and houses than hang out with you and your lack. There's more than enough. Nature is abundant. We only suffer when we act like locusts.
You've created this paperwork bardo that has disenfranchised a perfectly good and useful citizen, that had a lot to offer. I could have invented some amazing things. Contributed to literature, to medicine, to science even. But you threw me out with the trash. You don't know how to value what's right in front of you.
And up till now I didn't either. The paperwork bardo showed me what's important. Freedom has nothing to do with how much credit you have, and whether you can get an accountant or a lawyer to do all your hoop jumping for you. It's all about choices; I thought I was free only if I had these choices that were enabled by the right qualifications and forms. Turns out freedom has nothing to do with paperwork at all. One of the greatest bestowals of freedom upon us comes from dwelling on the thought of death. We still get post for my late father he still 'exists' on somebody's database. Impermanence, something that can render all of our pursuits meaningless and equally precious in an instant. It laughs at us constantly throughout life.
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