The northlondonhippy

Just another day in hippy-heaven! How’s every­thing lit­tle thing with you?

I met my old friend for some drinks last night and had a very enjoy­able time. I’d not seen him in sev­eral months, it was good to catch up. While there will be no work with him any­time soon, we agreed to make an effort to stay in touch and he is up for tak­ing some shrooms with me soon.

The real high­light of my evening was my mini-cab jour­ney back to Casa del Hippy, which was spent in deep con­ver­sa­tion with my dri­ver. He was an Arab gen­tle­man and unashamed sup­porter of one Osama Bin Laden and his merry band of cold-blooded killers, Al Qaeda. He doesn’t view them as ter­ror­ists at all; he sees them as “free­dom fight­ers”. His opin­ions didn’t shock me, but his will­ing­ness to share them so openly with me, left me more than surprised.

Now, hear­ing ter­ror­ists being referred to as “free­dom fight­ers” is noth­ing new to me. As a jour­nal­ist, I was taught early on that one man’s ter­ror­ist is another man’s free­dom fighter. If mem­ory serves, the style of both the Asso­ci­ated Press and Reuters is to not use the word “ter­ror­ist” unless it is in a direct quote from a source or inter­view subject.

I’ll give you an exam­ple, if you lived in Britain in the late 1700s, you prob­a­bly would have viewed George Wash­ing­ton and his fellow-fighters as ter­ror­ists hell-bent on end­ing the King’s rule in the colonies. Sug­gest that to an Amer­i­can today and you would prob­a­bly be smacked in the face, or reported to the office of Un-American activ­i­ties for fur­ther inter­ro­ga­tion. Bring on the rub­ber hoses.

I can think of a few cur­rent and recent world-leaders that started out com­mit­ting ter­ror­ist acts. How about one I admire, Nel­son Man­dela,? He was involved in vio­lence against the state. I won’t argue that the state he attacked and its sys­tem of apartheid was evil, but do the ends always jus­tify the means? Machi­avelli cer­tainly had a point, but if you sub­scribe to his phi­los­o­phy, then you would have to extend it to peo­ple who’s ide­ol­ogy you do not agree with — you would still have to respect their right to pur­sue their own goals by what­ever means they choose.

My mini­cab dri­ver, who quite con­fi­dently claimed his views were held by the major­ity of Arabs around the world, said that the vic­tims of the Madrid bomb­ings deserved to be killed, “because that is what hap­pens in a war and this is a real war with Al Qaeda.” He gen­uinely believed that all of those peo­ple, over 200 dead and more than a thou­sand injured, were legit­i­mate tar­gets. He said all this in a calm, gen­tle man­ner with a smile on his face, which made it all the more disconcerting.

I am not going to claim that all Mus­lims feel that way, just because one mouthy taxi dri­ver says so, but I do think that his opin­ions are more widely held than you or I would care to believe. My trav­els whiling work­ing have brought me into con­tact with extrem­ists before, there’s only one way to han­dle them. Lis­ten politely and keep your own views pri­vate, dis­agree­ing or argu­ing will not do you any favours.

I when got home, I relayed this tale to Mrs. Hippy. She thought I should have got­ten his details and reported him. To whom and for what, I asked. He’s enti­tled to his opin­ions, no mat­ter how repul­sive I may find them. And as far as I can remem­ber, thought-crimes only exist in “1984”. There’s was noth­ing I could or should do about it.

I’ve begun to think I was born at the wrong time. No, I don’t mean too late, I don’t believe all this “good old days” non­sense. The world is not that great a place now and it wasn’t back then, although dif­fer­ent rea­sons ruin dif­fer­ent times.

I try to imag­ine what the world will be like in one thou­sand years. I know that is silly, because it is fairly unknow­able. I don’t sub­scribe to a Gene Roddenberry-Star Trek ver­sion of a future utopia, though I can appre­ci­ate his opti­mism. I think about a future where dif­fer­ences in race, nation­al­ity, reli­gion are all gone and over a period of one hun­dred cen­turies, this level of change is cer­tainly pos­si­ble. Likely is another story.

We live in a world where every major city is one suit­case nuke away from being blown back into the stone age, where gov­ern­ments, espe­cially the US are erod­ing our civil lib­er­ties daily. And what is at the root of all of this? No, not the threat of ter­ror­ism, that is a symp­tom of the greater prob­lem, the divi­sions across the globe.

Every­thing that sep­a­rates us today, all the things I’ve men­tioned above, race, reli­gion, nation­al­ity, plus poverty, are all behind the insta­bil­ity in the world today. They always have been, but thanks to glob­al­i­sa­tion and the media, these divides have never been more appar­ent. The key is the homog­e­niza­tion of the entire planet.

What the fuck does that mean? What it means that over time, the res­i­dents of this planet need to unite, how about under the catch-all ban­ner of earthlings?

Think about it, if we all view the entire world as one place that we all reside upon, think about how it might change the way we treat each other. I read a report the other day that said by 2050, the white folks in Amer­ica will be out­num­bered by “peo­ple of colour”. I think this is great! I’m by no means a racial purist, leave that to the eugen­ics nuts, but I dream of the day when there is just one race on the planet, the human race.

Think about it, if every­one was just a shade of brown, it would elim­i­nate one of society’s biggest dividers. It will hap­pen, not in my life­time, but one day this will be true and it will be a good thing.

Nation­al­ity and reli­gion are a bit trick­ier, since they are ide­o­log­i­cal rather than phys­i­cal. If you look at the “us vs. them” nature of the world today and extrap­o­late it a bit fur­ther, you see that there are two com­pet­ing sides already, the west vs. the fun­da­men­tal­ist Arabs. In terms of resources, the US and its allies have the upper hand, but in turns of nation­al­ity and reli­gion, Al Qaeda is winning.

What do I mean, that Al Qaeda are winning?

OK, for starters, Al Qaeda blurs the nation­al­ity issue, its loose col­lec­tion of groups and mem­bers come from just about every coun­try. They see them­selves as Mus­lims first, their nation­al­ity is sec­ondary or totally unim­por­tant to them. In this regard, they are doing more to unite their cause than Amer­ica. The US, on the other hand, has suc­ceeded in dam­ag­ing or destroy­ing rela­tion­ships with some of their old­est post-world-war-two allies. Amer­ica is more iso­lated today than I can ever remember.

And how about reli­gion? Again, Al Qaeda scores well because they are com­mit­ted to their fun­da­men­tal­ist views and see it as a foun­da­tion for every­thing else they believe. The west, with its mix­ture of Judeo-Christian and mod­er­ate Mus­lim val­ues has no mid­dle ground, and they can’t even man­age to have a smooth co-existence amongst them­selves. How can the west be an exam­ple to the rest of the world when they are not show­ing a uni­fied front?

One side will be vic­to­ri­ous over the other, that much is clear, its a ques­tion of which one. Of course, I want the west to win, but I have clear enough vision to see that this is not guar­an­teed. Com­pla­cency in the face of com­mit­ted resis­tance could lose this fight. So could a fuck­ing dun­der­head like George W. Bush!

I don’t have all the answers, I’m not even sure of all the ques­tions. I do know that the world has always changed and will always con­tinue to change. The shape of the future is unknown, but I like to think that in one-thousand years, we might man­age to put an end to most of this shit. A boy can dream.

I’m start­ing to won­der if anyone’s vis­ited my blog yet. Only one per­son knows about this so far, my brother and he hasn’t really both­ered to read any of it yet. I haven’t told Mrs Hippy, but I will, once I build up the archive a bit.

Email me if you’ve read any of my blog, I’d be inter­ested in hear­ing from *you*

“Your ass is a space ship that I want to ride.…“