Voting Conservative is like voting for the school bully, that while he (or she) is ragging someone else, your arse is safe, but really you’re just sweating, hoping to stay under his radar for another day.
And, of course, part of appeasing the bully is picking on his victims, currying favour through emulating his actions. Flattery, you hope, will get you everywhere.
The ultimate act of a coward is to betray the weak, and bullies and their sycophants always attack the weak.
But that flat eyed hatred you see in his eyes is the mark of the xenophobe, who is grand in his own eyes through causing abject misery to others.
He doesn’t care about you. His cunning is such that he knows you are ruled by fear, he knows that he is the leader of cowards, he knows that he can turn on you or any one of his simpering acolytes and the pack will follow and you will be reduced to nothing but red hot shame.
Severed from the crowd, your panicked, desperate, eyes search for an escape that has been closed off by your own cowardice, terror and abject fear. In your heart of hearts you know just what you are. You might pray for courage, but the thought of ever standing up to your tormentor only reduces you further into abject misery and fear.
You’ll never be as confident as him, never swagger like him, never know his power which is what you think of a bravery.
But the brave do not swagger, the brave are those who stand when everything seems lost, when every bone is melting, when terror is at its height and, with trembling lips, say, ‘No’, and whatever else follows, do not step back from that line, who stand or fall but never surrender.
Even after perhaps years of abuse, when that day comes, a moment that you have no idea whether you will even survive, on that day you truly find out what liberation means. No matter how battered, broken and beaten you are, the first time you stand up is the day you come home to yourself.
I grew up the appeaser, the smiler, the coward, broken by bullies, hiding, with shame as my constant companion. I ceased to even exist to myself with not a single thought my own. The first time I said ‘no’ didn’t come in some blinding flash of revelation, it came when I realised that nothing and no one was going to save me. I knew that I had to put myself, body and soul, in harms way, and say that one terrible word, for the first time ever. I knew that it had to come out of my mouth, and knew, once released, that there could be no turning back.
Today I know that perhaps the hardest word in the English language is merely two letters long. A fateful word, a word of power. “No.”
When you say that word for the first time and mean it, you cease to be a victim and take the first step to becoming your whole self.
I started with Conservatives and I’ll end with them, because what they are is a pack of arrogant bullies, who have held this nation in thrall through their appalling abuse of power. In this election, voting against them is a vote against the most despicable bullies and the one thing bullies are not, is strong and stable. They rule by fear and they are rotten to the core.
I’ll be voting for the many, not the few. Think about that for a moment, so very few to have caused so much harm and their bully in chief won’t even face us in this election. Wow!
KOG. 05 June 2017
