I am frightened by the culture I was born into (a list poem)
Channel: Artist as Family
Date: 2023-09-17

I am frightened by the culture I was born into (a list poem by Patrick Jones)

"Yeah well my phone’s fucked and they won't give me a new sim until I get vaxxed so I gave in, just got the first shot. I need the phone to log onto my computer for work. Work also breathing down my neck with a deadline of the 17th for declaring my ‘status’. So whatever. I hope the bastard thing kills me." – email from a Melbourne academic, 1 Dec 2021.

I am frightened by the culture I was born into. I am scared of scientific reductionism. I fear the aggregation of poisons from industry and the increasing intransigence to heterodox thinkers by governments and universities. I am worried by what the expert class brings to Country. It distresses me few read global development as an extension of colonialism, and in its currency colonialism is again unseen by mob morality. 

I feel ill 'the educated' are uncritical of the State-Pharma nexus. I fear the results when doctors and researchers who raise red flags are demoted, disappeared and censored. I’m terrified by the many who don’t question and who in their shame attack the other others. I’m sickened by the profits of patriarchal medicine and how this profit blooms in biomes and inflames bodies. It distresses me medical journals have become “information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry” (Richard Horton, The Lancet editor, 2004). My gut turns with the lack of consent. Communitarianism is bottom up, grassroots consensus not powering over the other from above. I’m dismayed by friends who, having been coerced – having to feed their families – now turn on me parroting, ‘White-supremacist! Conspiracy theorist! Anti-vaxxer!’

Even if I refuse directly what industry brings to Country, the rush now on gene engineering and editing means my family and community are likely not free from the spillovers, mutations and contaminants. Antidepressants are awash in the riparians of Country. Nanoplastics in every cell, every biota, and thus in our food, our bodies. Body and food sovereignty is dying, and how I’m reading it, the single greatest threat to life is the romanticisation of progress leading us all into digital prisons, cheered on by the movement I’ve served my whole adult life – the Green-Left – until now. Diversity at all costs, except for 'Them, the deplorable contagions!'

I’m scared that people like us, who will again refuse the coming assault of biotechs, will be further discriminated against. I’m alarmed and shocked at how few want to examine the coercion, intolerance and abuse of the past few years. I’m predicting a future of incarceration for those who resist Pharmacolonisation, and I feel no hope for a society that’s constructed “man-made mass death” (Deborah Bird Rose, anthropologist, 2011) as its modus operandi, and this fear is traumatising to me.

I will continue to serve the worlds of the world, and serve the communities of life who stand for life, and in doing so stand against the cult of Scientism, against “patriarchy’s project” (Vandana Shiva, food sovereignty activist, 2009). In this continuum of service I will name my fears alongside my shame and grief, and cry out my sacred, old briney waters into the rich, life-bringing humus of Mother Country, for anyone or anything connected to hear. I won’t wield my sword in war-like reaction, even in chains I will dance with it like my old people before me.