This is not home (written 1998)
There are very few homes these days.
What homes there are, are usually broken ... along with the people who live in them.
A lot of noise used to be made about the increasing numbers of "broken" homes.
But now they're called "single-parent families" and they're quite normal.
At least that what everyone says.
But they're a bit of a burden on the economy – not really "viable economic units", as a leading bureaucrat once called them.
It's going to be a problem in future.
It's supposed to be a new phenomenon, all the single mothers and fathers, and all the abused children, and all the broken homes.
But that's bullshit.
Last century, and the century before, and the century before that, people lived in broken homes for lots of reasons: war (husbands and sons died); economic pressures (wages were so fucking low that it was easier to sell the children out to work); alcohol and drug dependency (which you would swear only came about in the last 10 years, but which is in fact perennial); people getting worked to death really early in their lives (men, women, and children); murder, rape and all the other niceties of humanity ... and so on.
So you see, broken homes have always been with us.
It's just that governments these days, or more precisely the technocrats that advise the governments and the pissweak political parties that we have in the west, and just about everywhere else, are refusing to spend money on people. It just doesn't seem worth it to them.
Instead they choose to support large businesses, at the same time giving people the impression that government has nothing to do with them.
And welfare bashing has come in big time. The technocrats call it "Nanny Statism" to give the impression that people on welfare, or from broken homes, or who are on drugs, or who have extreme disabilities, or who are too weak to defend themselves have no right to leech of the fit and healthy and economically productive.
That is called "Social Darwinism" and it is the worldview of Eugenicists like Hitler.
That's why we're in such danger of reverting to a new form of fascism. That's why there are hardly any homes any more, only houses.
That's why suicide is on the rise again.
No wonder Durkheim was concerned about suicide when he was, and he was right: suicide is firstly a sociological phenomenon, not a psychological one.
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A home would be nice, dontcha think?