This is a deviation from the standard fare of commentary on this website. I am busy turning thirty years old over the weekend so some pondering is warranted.
After more than ten years of my life dedicated towards activism and journalism, I feel like I am in a position to share some insight about it while we’re here.
Here’s the thing about being a dissident in a country where government oppression is the norm.
You will become ineligible for opportunities which would have otherwise been open to you.
People will avoid certain subjects around you out of fear of publicly saying something they know to be truthful (and therefore, potentially troublesome).
The government and its cronies will be watching. The amount of discomfort you’ll experience will be directly proportional to the visibility and impact of whatever form of dissent you engage in.
But, you will also experience what it means to be truly free.
You will not live a mockery of a life in which you grovel for favour, wasting your precious time on appeasing people who are further up the chain.
Your thoughts will belong to you. Your words will roll off your tongue uninhibited. Your dignity will not be up for sale.
Your fear of retribution will no longer pin you down. It will still be there – but as your trusty alert system, not as your jailer.
Sure, some employers will avoid outspoken individuals who have a public record of anti-corruption activism. You certainly won’t be getting any cosy directorship appointments on a government authority’s board anytime soon.
Having said that, having a spine is somewhat advantageous, a perk so distinguished it separates us from a whole other class of invertebrate organisms. Being spineless is for molluscs.
People who avoid ‘controversial’ topics will become deeply uninteresting to you. You will be seen as a nuisance. In the long-term, it won’t matter. In fact, it will move you towards the kind of spaces where you can find more dissent, not less of it.
I understand that not everyone can afford to be so cavalier with their disdain for corruption. I am well aware that most people depend on the government to make a living.
I am also aware that within that dynamic, the government is far more dependent on people than people are dependent on government.
The Labour Party likes to project itself as an omniscient provider of wealth, as if the country’s GDP is flowing from a magical fountain at Mile End.
Though it likes to pay lip-service to workers and ensures that it signs enough collective agreements to keep major shutdowns at bay, the truth is that the scale of the damage the Labour Party has caused to the country’s prospects dwarf any minor advances made in that regard.
None of the perks you may have on your government job are worth remaining silent for. Not when you know for a fact that everything is slowly and steadily getting worse over time.
They can trumpet economic growth all they want – the fact is that they do not have the competence to talk about anything other than money.
If making money is all you want to hear about, then banging spoons on pots and pans may not be the right fit for you. You’ll be much better off being a corporate mollusc.
But if you yearn to live in a world where you do not need to censor yourself, where decisions are taken for the benefit of the many instead of the select few, where the air is no longer toxic and the water is drinkable and the seas are not covered in toxic sludge, where the roads do not feel like a Kafkaesque nightmare and there is a general sense of planning and consideration to it all, where it does not feel like we are all just stacked on top of each other, elbowing one another in the hopes of coming out on top —
If that’s what you yearn for, then we may just have the right club for you…
Well said Julian!