Tag: Refugee

The Great Showmen

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

What’s going on in the world then. A section of Trump’s infamous border wall with Mexico blew down. Apparently Hurricane Hanna got the better of it. Past wall failures include another section in California being knocked over in January following a strong breeze, smugglers taking minutes to saw, yes saw, through sections of the wall and another incident in San Diego apparently saw them doing this eighteen times in one month. Perhaps a series of the same incident would be more apt. It does suggest he has been making it on the cheap and undoubtedly this does fit in with the type of image of Trump we have. Doing things for show without any substance and grabbing everyone’s attention with another outlandish ‘project’ the moment the old one starts to fall to pieces. Why anyone thought a showman would change his stripes I just don’t know.

The plan wasn’t just to talk about Trump, it was to mention a few things going on in the world but it’s so easy to start with him and get carried away with whatever it is he’s doing now. I think the whole world knows what’s going on, although saying that having just quickly checked the BBC, even on the actual US regional page it doesn’t really mention a lot about how arguably troops, or their equivalent at least, have been deployed on domestic streets and quite violently against peaceful protesters. It’s almost more interesting to see what’s newsworthy and not being reported. The man is gearing up for an election as he tries to get everyone to forget about his handling of Covid-19, as well as the fact he’s still continuing to handle it badly, and focus instead on how good he is or would be at cleaning up the streets. The law and order campaign approach being one usually deployed by a hopeful incoming President criticising the current occupants job, how that quite works with a sitting President suggesting he’ll clean up the streets of not only a country he’s been running for four years but that he’s repeatedly said has “been made great again” is still slightly unclear. I’m sure he’ll all confuse us with his explanation.

What else has been going on then. Well he’s still orange. He’s still the slightly shittier American version of a television series that originated in Britain and revolved around Boris Johnson performing a stage version of A Clockwork Orange. We thought it could never be topped but evidently in the most brash of American ways it has been. I wonder which one will run for longer without being cancelled. I wonder too what the spin-off would be; their best mate Nigel Farage losing all his money and having to hang out with the working men he pretends he’s one of. Or the ultimate twist of fate, through a loophole in the law he gets kicked out of the UK and manages to claim refugee status in Germany with his wife and kids. Now that would be both compulsive and car crash television. Maybe Boris, Don and Nige could be the three men to Dominic Cummings as the baby; probably doing his best version of an early Stewie Griffin when he was his in murder everyone faze. They just don’t make television like they used to. They don’t really make reality what it once was either though. Maybe it’s just those blurred lines confusing us all. Which is which, we just don’t know.

To Help Others And Alleviate The Loneliness Within

Hamar Williams1 Comment

One of the pleasures of my day is strangely enough the five hours I spend working. Not always, but one of my current jobs is a little home renovation for a friend and I find myself in a flat just working away at fixing and building while listening to podcasts. I’m in my own little world with whatever I want to listen to. It’s a real pleasure. Today I was listening to one of The Economist‘s podcasts and part of it was about loneliness and how helping people can alleviate this sense of loneliness, but more importantly boost our immune system. Apparently it leads to the down regulation of inflammatory genes, which are their words and I’m guessing a good thing. It was in relation to this current virus and the paradox of quarantine, loneliness and our health. As I said they discussed how helping people can alleviate our sense of loneliness but they also discovered that helping people can make us happier and more connected with those who we help. They used two groups of people for this study, one who helped themselves and one who helped others.

This made me think of a period in my life when I helped people. I spent six months in Greece about three years ago working with refugees crossing from Turkey, having come from countries like Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I don’t like the word helped because it is loaded, patronising and self aggrandising. I prefer to just say I handed out food and clothes, fixed things, drove my van around a lot and played football even more, as well as just hung out with people and tried to make them feel like human beings. The group I was doing this with generally left around the same time and I remained in contact to varying degrees as we all spent the next year trying to get over everything we had seen and felt. It feels and sounds self indulgent, and I don’t even like writing these words because of that, but it’s true, as is the fact I’m sure some people left with what I would describe as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. My point though is that I have discussed with some people and we agreed there was a sense that this was a good time, in the moment we had been truly happy. I always put this down to the fact it was a real true moment and you were needed urgently, there was no time for this fake bullshit we live in our regular existence. I always thought that it was life in the true sense that made us feel this strange paradoxical happiness but perhaps it was just the fact we were helping people and feeling more connected on a human level. I still don’t know the answers or the truth and I don’t always feel comfortable talking about it as I feel self-indulgent considering everything else that was going on to others and is still going on, but these were my thoughts and what better than this daily monster I’ve created to share them on.