Concrete Pencil: Get angry...but get smart

By John Hill on June 24, 2009 11:44 AM |

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Dan Bourke is still away, but John Hill isn't going to start a protest about it

The time has come to rise up and be counted.

We've seen what happens when we linger in the shade with our apathy hanging out like a beer gut. Banks lose our money and then raid our bailouts for bonuses. The Government restricts our freedoms to protect us. The BNP weasels its way into our parliaments, and our MPs build moats with our taxes.

It's time to get angry. The massed hordes are milling next to the station, preparing to storm the citadel just as soon as Jim gets out of the shower and wanders down with the burning torches.

Apathy, it seems, is the worst sin a man can commit in the age of opinion and comments sections. It is the demon that led Fox News commentator Glenn Beck to stare wild-eyed into the camera and yell, "Believe in something, even if it's wrong".

While it may be tempting to kick unopinionated dawdlers up the hill like an unhinged gym teacher, the fact is that we're not an apathetic nation. We get angry all the time, thankyou very much. It's just that we've lost the ability to differentiate between "righteous crusade" and "adult tantrum".

The world is a stressful place, and we're massaged into believing we're at the centre of it. Newspapers, shops and politicians are desperate to mollycoddle us for our support and our money. So if we say that we'd rather talk about Susan Boyle than the Sudan, none of our pillars of authority are going to give us a slap.

The rise of Twitter, forums and commenting allow us to launch the hounds of hell on The Man even before we've thought about it, whether it's the company that denied us a refund for that film we saw on the small IMAX screen or the scriptwriters that imprisoned Corrie's Deirdre Barlow. But imagine how you'd feel if your Wikipedia entry listed you as the guy that devoted twenty years to bringing back the Wispa, or banning the bacon butty?

There's no shortage of people out there trying to get our voice, and there are literally millions of things out there that could make our heads explode with fury. But it's easy for authority to dismiss a protest when they know it's going to blow over the moment the next shiny object comes along.

Change is not impossible, if you care enough. So there's so there's no better time to use your brain first, and to really think about how important something is to you before you start a Facebook protest group about it.

After all, you don't want your children to remember you as the freedom-fighter holding up a badly-spelled sign slamming Teletubbies, do you?