It doesn’t always feel as if we can make our own future. We can’t control the weather. We can’t always prevent illness. But we can try to wrap up against cold winds, snow or rain. And we may stay healthy if we eat well, exercise, and generally look after ourselves. Of course, this can all go a bit wonky even if we do our best. How do you wrap up well if you are very poor and you don’t have warm clothing? How do you stay healthy if you live in a damp house?
I’m sitting in a cafe near the centre of Dundee, writing this. It was raining outside earlier and the pavement is wet and shining. By the side of a building opposite me, a man in a bright yellow jacket is passing a long metal pole up to another man on a platform, and that man is passing the same pole to another man on a higher platform. Putting up scaffolding. I bet they are freezing. I know I was, just walking from my work to this cafe. Up there outside on a scaffold all day, that must be very cold. I wonder what those guys think about the future.
A long time ago, I worked in a factory. I’d get on a bus very early in the morning and I remember it would trundle down the road. The drone of it mixes in my mind with a memory of dread. I’d always sit on the top deck of the bus, so I could see further, and feel just a little bit more free. Then, I’d get off at the stop near my work and I’d always sigh, knowing I had a day ahead in the factory, with the massive clatter of looms hitting me as soon as I walked down a narrow passage to a clocking in machine. I wished fervently for a better future.
Eventually, and it only took a few years, I found an escape. I went to University as a mature student, and later I got a string of jobs in community and youth worker roles, and as a Welfare Rights Officer. My latest job, which I’ve been doing for 4 years is as a Mental Health Support Worker. I made myself a better future, although it was never easy, and sometimes the better future became difficult. Like when I got burnt out a few years back, and I had to take a break from helping people so I could help myself – to recover.
Our future can be better, and sometimes we can make it so, but the future has a habit of becoming the present, and it changes. I didn’t get burnt out a few years ago because of weakness, but because of a storm around me – cutbacks in the number of my working colleagues, and a huge rise in our workload. Life got harder for people on benefits, people I was helping. They’d get sanctioned or refused benefits. Me and my depleted band of colleagues would try hard to win their cases, but sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes, people we had tried to help chose to end their own lives rather than keep struggling. That got to me. It got to me a lot.
Later, I helped other folk in Dundee campaign for a 24 hour centre to help people so that people in desperation would always have somewhere to go to. That place exists. So, there are storms, there are sad times, and there are many times we’d rather didn’t happen, but there are always people who help each other. Those people are always making a better future.
Making a better future is something like recurring theme music in my life. For the last few months, I often felt that a better future was a distant prospect. On dozens of anti fascist protests, I stood with good friends on a frontline none of us asked for. In Dundee, Aberdeen, Perth, and Falkirk we faced down the screaming and deranged racist chanting of a dwindling but dangerous gang of thugs who revelled in abusing women and trying to intimidate asylum seekers and other minorities. As a senior steward, I organised protection for all who came to counter protests in Dundee. It was never easy. It’s haunting. But gradually we forced the far Right to retreat. We made our communities safer for all.
For several months I had no time for writing. I missed it. I missed thinking about normal things, like parks and gardens, or seeing geese in a giant V high in a blue sky. I missed wondering about things like making a better future. Rarely did I have the time or calmness to notice scaffolders in bright yellow jackets or wonder what they were thinking.
Whatever they were thinking, they and the rest of us build the future together, no matter how cold individual days may be.
HARVEY DUKE 