This is about the spaces they take from us to give themselves.
Here I am with spaces all around me. In a city in Europe whose rich history covers its streets with darkness and brightness. I’m here in this space, with everyone enjoying the music and their freedom. But back home, there are few such spaces. They are building palaces at our expense. The cost of their space is ours. They have set out to take our spaces to make them their own. The cost of their freedom to steal is the freedom from our own, the very youth that would ever build our future.
Thousands in jail, the spaces they should be inhabiting stolen from them, and for what? For luxury palaces, gardens and special interests. For spaces that may end up abandoned but guarded. Empty spaces, as empty as their dreams for a future.
The present I’m experiencing in those foreign spaces abroad is what we deserve back home. It’s what those thrown in prison deserve.
We live in a transmogrified past and the only way to reach the present is to travel. I never thought time travel was possible, but it is. You just have to leave the borders of this time warp, where its inhabitants are stuck in slavery. It’s not easy to leave. The wardens are not just our jailers but those very same foreign countries who arm the oppressors with weapons and technology to keep us locked in. The condescending view of us in their embassies as they forget about the riches they’ve stolen. That sense of entitlement for a better life even though its price is paid by our enslavement.
My friends are in jail so that some General’s wife can have her customized palaces. These palaces are not just built with the money they steal from us, but with our lives. Their fortress is not just the walls they put up, but the network of greedy interests that produce humans that stand in the way of justice to maintain the corruption that keeps them thriving.
We never asked for this, we would have been happy to dance. But what choice were we given? To dance away while trampling the rights and lives of others underfoot. To dance while trampling their dignity and ours. It’s not much of a choice. Both are a form of death. One of them closer to the literal sense of the word, our lives being destroyed if we speak, the other a literary death, the death of our conscience and humanity.
Fuck their palaces. We will dance when we can to counter their greed. We will speak when we can to counter our death.
