(Up to: Scribblings Calmness In ABig City )

Visiting Central London today for the first time in many months, I was reminded certainly not of the things I believe we should strive for, but of those which I have come to dread and resent, as part of the Western world and all its misgivings. I was reminded of why I will not work in London, why many people I know have plans to move away from the country altogether, and why punk is alive and well in mainland Britain and, indeed, the Western world over.

I have difficulty in imagining myself arriving in central London for the first time, say as a tourist. However, I imagine that the first thing one notices upon a venture is the inescapable amount of traffic. The roads, the traffic lights, the street furniture. Like a wicker cage placed upon the streets and set in metal. The second thing would be the bulidings, as claustrophobically they stand by the side of the frectic streets, towering over pedestrians to remind people how much money they all symbolise in such a small place.

Only after some wandering around (assuming the usual sightseeing, the statues, the parks, the homeless people) would one actually even cast a glimpse at the people. Not the homeless people, not the hotdog sellers and the park attendants with their funny vans, not even the street artists standing on silver painted boxes waving umbrellas at small children at dogs. The people that you try so hard to avoid, and that try so hard to avoid you, down to the smallest catch-of-the-eye.

No-one waves, no-one smiles, no-one dances and points at the sky for no reason. Everyone's there to just enjoy living off other people. Don't try anything different, work for a large company, earn money, spend it on other large companies - fur coats, shiny cars and over-expensive sandwiches. Die.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm trying to compare the nation's largest city, the capital, to areas familiar and underdeveloped, or to small suburban towns on European outskirts. Maybe I'm being unfair.

So then I think wait, why is London like this? (And yes, I'm sure there are nice parts. Parts where people smile, and if you don't get run over then you won't get crushed by a horde of sale shoppers.) Is this really what society has evolved to? The self-congratulatory pinnacle of a culture centred around doing well for oneself is one of nonchalance and egotistical blandness? A world in which attention is almost so facile, so instantaneous just by standing out from the predictable crowd, that it's almost not worth having? A land of money-filled proleteriat that are under the illusion of power and yet have none, and that have even less of a motivation to change their environment whlie it means that they don't have to think in order to live?

Isn't it funny? TV recently offered these people, along with the rest of the nation, the chance to decide who the greatest Britons ever remembered are. People like idols, they respect those with ideas, those that influence the world and change society, and for the better if the polls were to be believed. But that's just where it stops. Adulation. How many of those people voting actually care enough about either themselves or society as a whole to dare to think that they could reach such heights? Being great is good, but being mediocre is better. How ironic.

So am I being unfair to London? Is it, by its large-scale, centralised nature that induces a feeling of separation and distance, simply too big for its own good, an epitome of overcrowding and people-per-square-foot?

Elsewhere, what do we see? Well, why are people leaving the country? This a country adapted to capitalism, of which the Capital (heh, more irony) is just the headquarters. Everywhere else, people either spend their lives flitting and flickering from donating their time to one private corporation or another, hoping each time that the next job will be the job that kills them. Dissatisfied disidentification has never been so great - the subjects no longer identify with (nor control) the government that regulates their life, the poor proles have never seen eye to eye with the rich ones, while all the time the gap between the younger generation and the older (that both try to keep them safe and take away their dignity in one fell swoop) widens to a point of breaking.

For every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every influence in society, there is an equal and opposite disinfluence. It may not appear to be as instantaneous as Newton's reaction, but it is there. From deep outside the ruling class' perception, there will always be the dissatisfied, the adverse, the counterbalance. Capitalism as a societal goal has become arrogant and stale. The high is fluctuating and losingits confidence, while slowly, little by little, the downers kick in somewhere deep underground. The system kicks too many people in the head while they sleep, and the balance of power is slowly becoming more and more transparent, until it at last it is to be revealed as a perfect imbalance. Things are about to go too far, and even if the proles may not do anything about it, they at least know which side of the present they are on.

And on the other side of the proles, facing the empowered through the mist and staring into the backs of their eyes, the pull towards rebellion grows stronger, driven on by the increasing arrogant pedestal heights of the capitalists, and fueled by the waste that only those who didn't cause it can see.

The scales have almost tipped enough. The punks are about to take to the streets and take back what's everyone's. And the best thing is, nobody will notice until it's too late.