No. 63 The Curse of Childbirth

In the song Working Class Hero, John Lennon says:

“As soon as you’re born they make you feel small, By giving you no time instead of it all, Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all…”

Now even moreso than ever. As well as everything else a child has foisted upon it during its formative years on this heartless wasteland of a rock we inhabit, nowadays they are also targetted from birth by the disgusting and murky world of marketing, eager to rob a child’s innocence in return for their share of the 30 pieces of silver that perpetually passes through this shabby industry.

Their conniving minds realised that kids were an untapped pressure lobby, ripe for recruitment in the continuing war to rinse every last penny from the pockets of their beleaguered parents. So they market to them with every manner of tat going, safe in the knowledge that peer pressure will ensure a healthy ROI (that’s a vomit-inducing marketing and business acronym for Return On Investment).

The savagery with which children are propelled into the adult world is sickening, the last vestiges of innocence are all but drained away by the time they hit double figures and it’s not a great deal different than how it was 100-odd years back. The days when we’d happily put them up chimneys or send them down the mines to detect gas once the canary had popped its clogs.

Put yourself in the mind of an about-to-be-born baby. If just prior to the moment of blinking your way into the natural light you became fully conscious of your predicament and a voice told you just what you had to look forward to, would you come out?

Picture a life where  for the first sixteen years you would either keep your head above water or sink to the bottom, suffering the slings and arrows of everyone from teachers to peers along the way, whilst teetering upon the tightrope, either side of which lies lasting disappointment to your parents – the ones who tried to give you everything and you enthusiastically repaid with casual contempt.

Then you realise that was the easy part! What lies ahead is a damn sight more horrendous. A continual cycle of boredom, servitude and absolute fear of losing everything. Then there’s the constant spectre of failure, always lurking in the background just waiting to swallow you up in a perpetual state of regret and self-loathing.  Throw in the lies that the greedy and powerful spread in their efforts to keep you down on your knees. The injustice perpertrated on a daily basis, grinding its stony thumb further and further into your mind, turning reason and emotion into a worthless pile of dust. The crime, the packs of feral youth, the war and conflict wiping out generations, the terror, the casual killing, the corruption, the callous cruelty, the arrogance and sneers of the greedy rich, the events beyond your control that push you closer and closer to the abyss; desensitizing you until all you feel is an aching sense of loss, but you’ve no idea why.

And for what exactly? So once you’ve served your use you can be cast aside and forgotten about? Left to rot for the final few years of your existence, having knocked your pan out for greater part of it. And during your time as a human commodity you’ve done your bit to repopulate the production line and sentenced your own children to the same fate.

When faced with that prospect, the sensible move for the about-to-be-born baby would surely be to turn tail and head for the hills.

Yes, when put like that, life seems about as endearing as a bag of spiders.

The way things are, perhaps the best a parent can do for their child is not have them in the first place. If the greed-driven animals out there are so desperate to own this world and everyone and everything in it, let them fucking have it!

I couldn’t really care less anymore.

In other news, you may remember I made the New Year’s Resolution to stop being nice to people. Well you’ll be pleased to hear that it’s going well. This week I refused to give up my seat to a fat person on the bus, one for whom a heart attack was clearly imminent. I let a door shut in the face of a student. And I neither smiled nor said “thank you” to a surly shopkeeper.

And on it goes.

Jeffman has had time to calm down since writing this and will hopefully have made a full recovery in time to launch his splendid new psychedelic music review blog.

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