As I walked around Clacton-on sea town centre in the freezing cold wind yesterday (13th December) I suggest even the most blindly optimistic among us would have seen a bleak picture before them. Woolworth’s, the store that was X-mas for me growing up in Ruislip Manor in the 70’s, lie broken and closing as do hundreds of small family run business across the UK.
Many people mutter: -Oh it’s a shame or blame the economy. I am afraid the only thing to blame is human greed. We would still be a proud nation of shopkeepers instead of a de-motivated sea of barcode scanners, if ‘many who had the money’ hadn’t needed to save 2p, 4p and up off the price of everything. The need to seek a bargain lead us out of our communities and local shops that supported our friends and family into our cars (that we hardly ever used for shopping) and on the road to the large genetic consumer brothels. We have willingly via our own greed destroyed the personality of our land into a land of tarmac parking spaces and glass and brick boxes.
Humans at their worst do what many animals don’t do we S**t in our own beds. We can never see the big picture. We can only see our own separate and small minded needs and wants. I know some clever corporate suits will tell us that we have choice and jobs and purchasing power. But in truth all we have is a bunch of heartless stuff made for profit and consumed to fill the void that as be left by a community we helped to kill off.
I contest that anything that looks like a bargain. It will have tailing behind it a tale of bad Karma from people who have had to work for nothing to make it, to the carbon footprint that has been stamped on your children’s future just so you can send it to a land fill in a few weeks, months and at the most a couple of years.
So as we pick over the bones of companies force to close because of our short sightedness, once again we are buying ‘Cheap goods’ born from the ill fate of others.
This soulless retail hell is what we wanted, you cannot say otherwise. For without our actions to support it this could never have manifested. Without the belief we could really have our cake and eat, we would not be wallowing in a media of doom and gloom. That famous line ‘he who is without sin’ stands today as it always has.
Be the change you want to see in the world, think about every action you take and understand that every action you take will ripple across the world and ultimately come back to haunt an older you or you children you supposedly care about. I have just scrapped the surface of a topic that, many will try to over complicate. Just think about everything you consume you owe it to yourself and the planet. Please note this is written as much to remind me as anyone else as I should know this more than anyone, having come from a family of shopkeepers who lost everything in the last recession of 1993.
Below Snap shot of the end of Clacton Pier yesterday morning ‘Brass monkey weather’
