'It's a shame to see good brains go to waste',
Says the CAB (Citizens Advice Bureau) woman who is dealing with my PIP (Personal Independent Payment) Appeal claim after it had been cancelled on dubious evidence.
This made me think of Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' with it's haunting first line:
'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...'
Which didn't make me think of myself but of someone I knew at University, and who decided to die.
How anecdotal to almost everyone has that become. We probably all knew someone who was bright, well-liked, fundamentally decent and aspired to the Good, yet who was able to give up on life without hope, sinking in a society that could no longer support them.
More than the distraction of Russian spies trying to re-surge the Cold War I would like the News to tell me about why people with good brains are being wasted. Why we end up having to do all we can to defend our benefits, why we struggle to get a foothold in the housing market and why, some of us, decide it is all too much?
This won't be polemical piece as I think politics is divisive enough but ask yourself why do these things happen to these people, and then is there anything that could make the situation better?
I'm an explorer of such questions and I don't necessarily expect easy or clear answers, but in pursuit of the question we may just find something that might work along the way. At least against the waste of life we may well feel that it's worth the journey.
