Yesterday's rant, along with some comments on the post before that about the inherent wankness of how politicians, are both examples of all together too common bitching. We could all write endless posts speculating about the general and specific causes of the apparently universal incompetence with which we all have to deal but, for today, let's concentrate on the other end of this problem.
As I'm sure I've already mentioned, the computer systems I'm using at work are quite hopelessly inefficient. Now examining and berating the reasons for this don't get my job done any quicker. Instead of waiting for things to improve, and with the help of a very good friend of mine, easy mate 
, I'm intending to modify these systems. A bit of relatively simple work with some of Excel's higher functions should make life easier and will probably cause my boss to shit bricks with glee.
This wouldn't be the cheap seats if there wasn't a tangent and so here it is. Reading the utterly fantastic Baghdad Blog, Salam Pax, I was struck by everything, but one brief comment in particular sparked the idea for this post.
When the US began dropping bombs on Baghdad the residents found that the air raid and all clear sirens were not as reliable as they could have been. In response to this a grassroots warning system quickly emerged whereby, as soon as bombers or bombs were spotted the local mosque would begin to call a certain verse.
The moment any other mosque heard this verse they would join in and very quickly the alert would spread over vast areas. Besides being hugely impressed this tale made me realise something. In any society we delegate certain tasks and responsibilities to specific people or groups. We do this so that we don't have to perform those tasks, not because we can't perform them.
How do we fight the vice like grip of the capitalist behemoths or break into the tinted glass world of our so-heavily insulated political leaders? The answer is simple, we don't. We don't need to fight the corporations or reach our politicians, we can just marginalize them.
We have the means to provide for and organise ourselves, all that is lacking is the will. What this comes down to is that there are things in our lives that just have to happen, be it doing the job you're paid for or avoiding death from the skies. If the people entrusted with facilitating these things drop the ball we can do it ourselves.
The truth of this is plain to see in areas of the so called 'developing world' where the masses are, quite rightly, refusing to bend over for big business and are taking their countries and their resources into their own hands. The problem is not how fucked everything is, but rather the fact that we've been tricked into believing it couldn't be any other way.
I was down in the city the other day and approached a crossing behind a group of other pedestrians. Looking around I noticed that there were no cars coming and the crossing light may even have turned to green, I'm not sure, but the crowd didn't move. Without slowing I just squeezed through them and carried on across the street, after which the crowd gradually started to follow.
Walking on a bit I realised that the people at the back of the crowd hadn't even looked at the traffic or the signal, but had instead concentrated solely on the heels of those in front. Talk about a metaphor for life! If we could just get more people to raise their heads and actually look at the world we could take back the power we entrusted to the few, that power they've abused for their own ends.
So look around you everybody, the little green man is right there just willing you to move forward!
