The collective will to overcome tyranny

Sometimes it's exhausting and it's difficult to see the wood for the trees amidst a tsunami of disinformation and misdirection. I hope today you'll indulge me to share a few personal thoughts?

Image - Martin McSweeney/Shutterstock

In moments of reflection in a world gone mad, I feel a sense of contentment and gratitude that I have the luxury of reading from the wide range of subscriptions I have invested in across a wide variety of subjects, from geopolitics to economics to climate science. As someone who has spent his working life as a ‘solution provider’, I had thought those days were in the rearview mirror as I settled into lazy days in retirement. Then, due to circumstances beyond my control and sharp practices by my mortgage provider, I lost my home during COVID and was forced to become my own solution provider.

That woke me up to the reality that no matter how comfortable you might feel in life, circumstances can hit you like a freight train. This is when you are truly tested, and I’m not going to lie, mentally I was broken, so much so, that I stood on a city train platform contemplating an exit. To this day, I have no idea how I had arrived at that selfish conclusion. A conclusion which would have destroyed the lives of those who loved me, but that’s the power of despair.

In that moment of loss of faith in the world, I was teetering on the edge of ending how I felt when a young woman did something I will never forget. She detected my distress; a perfect stranger put aside the world of me, me, me, and came up to ask if I was OK because I looked unwell. That simple act of humanity turned a pitch-black moment of hopelessness into one of restored faith. I never knew her name, but her face, her eyes, and the compassion she showed have never left me.

There’s often much talk about the police and their insensitivity and lack of empathy, but on that day I saw something very different. Can I be sure that a black man or a homeless person would have received the same level of compassion I was afforded? I can’t attest to that, but in that moment of need, they were professional and sympathetic, and they took me to the hospital for the help they believed I needed.

I share this for no other reason than to say I’m not a comfortable liberal writer who has been insulated from life’s challenges. I’m not even a well-educated writer. I left school when I was 16 and could never get on with working for others, probably because I was on the spectrum, so I became a freelancer long before it was fashionable. My qualifications come not from university, but rather from the university of life. I’ve survived on both beans on toast and, in the good times, eating in fancy restaurants and flying on Concorde. In partnership with the love of my life, we’ve raised three children, though, to be fair, she did more of the heavy lifting than I did in the early years. We put them all through college and University and, in one case, law school and the bar, so I’ve lived both the dream and the nightmare, and that’s what shapes who I am and how I write.

In a sick twist to this story, the mortgage company were sued in a class action, and after I had been forced to sell my house, they were forced to pay me compensation which, had it been made at the time, would have let me hang on to the house long enough to sell it on my terms.

My whole world is about knowledge, and writing here allows me to impart hours and hours of research culminating in the delivery of my thoughts based on a life of ups and downs. A decade ago, I lived in a big house, living the dream. Today I live in a rented property, forced to come out of retirement to do IT consulting work to help support my passion for writing here, because I believe I have something to contribute. How valuable that contribution is is up for debate, but with over 500 pieces under my belt, I’m proud of where I have landed.

The critical point is that, much like many of those who read my ramblings, nobody ever gave me a thing; I grew up in a working-class family on a social housing estate with a father who set an example of hard work and achievement in the face of adversity. He served his community for decades as a town councillor, so I understand the concept of public service and political struggle. What you read here comes from a lifetime of lived experience and a passion for politics and social justice.

As citizens, we have an obligation to provide a better tomorrow for our children and our grandchildren. If we’re honest, we’ve done a pretty shit job and should have done MUCH better. We now live in a world where if you’re in the bottom 50%, your children are unlikely to be able to jump on the housing ladder and do better than their parents did. That’s on us, but we can only provide better if we have leaders we can trust to have the best interests of future generations at the heart of their policymaking. In that respect, BOTH parties have failed us, both here in the UK, where I live, and certainly in the US, where politics is no longer about social responsibility but rather about corporate compliance.

There’s no way that Democrats should be in a position where November is a close election. It’s utter madness to think that a convicted criminal and his acolytes can dismantle democracy and the rule of law, dispense with social responsibility and moral decency in service of profit and still even be in the race. The system is so broken it’s not fit for purpose. It’s so damaged that those who advocate for common-sense, social, and economic reform are considered enemies of the state by BOTH parties. At what point will people wake up and say, ‘We have a problem’?

Sometimes I feel physically sick at how the vulnerable and those caught in possession of a black or brown face have become the Patsies for the failed policies of those at the top of the economic food chain and their political enablers. Otherism has been weaponised to mobilise division among those fighting for the crumbs from the rich man’s table. If you’re in the bottom 90%, you should be angry, and I mean really angry. If you’re in the now all-but-extinct middle class, you should be even angrier, because all you have to show for your effort to live the American dream is a frayed label with faded words ‘Middle Class’ written on it. A reminder of what might have been, as the have-nots have exiled you to the land of the have-nots.

Just as there are two parties in the US, there are now only two classes. Blaming those in the same overcrowded lifeboat for your declining prosperity, is the greatest achievement of the thieves and charlatans who have been stealing your share of the nation's wealth since the 1970s. They’ve convinced you that your economic slide is because of immigrants and gay people, and the drag on the economy from the poor, the disabled, and the lazy. Were it not so tragic, it would be amusing.

Now I may no longer be as well off as I was in years gone by, but the wealth of knowledge I have gathered makes me a rich man in a world where AI and the corrupt politicians controlling it are telling us what to think. You can’t place a value on critical thinking partnered with knowledge from extensive research and lived experience. While knowledge alone can’t pay the bills, it can help you mitigate the crimes these monsters are attempting to perpetrate on society and better inform your vote.

Knowledge is the antidote to the Trump narcotics that are being mainlined into those incapable of thinking for themselves. It’s the very reason Truth Matters exists. A place where you can come to read ‘no bullshit’ commentary and opinions based on just the facts. A place where you can come with the confidence that nobody is trying to pull the wool over your eyes or serve a political master. Just plain unvarnished truth delivered without fear or favour, designed to educate and inform, while at the same time encouraging critical thinking and a challenging of the political narrative. A place where someone tells you what you need to hear, NOT what you want to hear.

Every day I scour the social media landscape to curate content and present it for the consideration of the truth seekers that visit daily. It’s about providing thought-provoking content that I believe keeps people informed about the good, the bad, and the ugly of what’s going on in our upside-down world. The community we have built here together has changed my life for the better; it’s given a man in the autumn of his years a sense of meaning, a sense of being part of something special and much bigger than me. It’s what we have built to help defeat the tyranny we are being forced to endure.

It may seem unconnected, but this journey has motivated me to remodel a wilderness at the bottom of my garden, which, incidentally, helped me discover muscles I never thought I had. It’s opened my eyes once again to the extraordinary beauty of nature and the gift of plenty we often take for granted when it comes to growing food. It’s been a one-man crusade to tame nature and enter a partnership to grow my own vegetables. It’s the first year, so yes, mistakes have been made and lessons learned, but it leaves me optimistic for 2027. Gardening has become a political palate cleanser, enabling me to better express myself.

In addition, after losing two and a half stone doing the garden, it’s given me the opportunity to start running again, something I very much enjoyed in the past. So it’s back to a 6 am run to start the day. Just short runs to get back into the swing, then hopefully my ageing frame will allow me to push the boundaries a little further.

I’ll be off the radar tomorrow, as I was last week, but I’ll try to get a shorter post done later today and post it before I leave home in the morning. Keep an eye out for an early post tomorrow. Then I’ll be back as usual on Monday.

I know today’s post has been a bit of a departure and somewhat personal, but sometimes I think it’s important to understand what drives my thinking and my broader outlook on life. I don’t care where you find yourself on your life journey; I hope you feel that we are in this fight together. If you regularly read my work, I’m sure we already share a vision, but I wanted you to have a clearer understanding of the place my work comes from.

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