Power and money

Subject: Power and money.

We certainly live in strange times. Nothing to compare with the war years where our immediate survival depended on the success of the next battle, where rationing meant that the food on our table was meager to say the least and if you lived in certain cities your life and your families life could be ended by an indiscriminate bomb dropped from thousands of feet up in the sky. Life back then was tenuous to say the least and it's argued that the tension and the lack of a foreseeable end to our personal discomfort brought out a community spirit which drew people together and made them collectively strong.
When I watch 'the suites' on TV complacently discussing leaving the EU without a deal as if it will be nothing more than an economic blimp I wonder what sort of world they live in. Obviously they have shorted the pound and bought their chateau in Grenoble, they have bought plenty of euros and dollars and closed their subscription to the club so, which ever way things turn out they have planned for the future and have done what money always allows them to do 'make their own future'.
Standing off stage in the wings we, the ordinary Joe, watch the play as it unfurled. We weren't given a part to play other than a badly worded referendum decision and poor advice from those in the know. The money in our pockets gets lighter day by day and soon we will have the extra problem of far fewer things to buy with it. That of course could be seen as a blessing since we have become over consumerised with many of our finer instincts blunted by the need to show our pecking order in the society we live in by purchasing  shiny things, irrespective of their actual worth. Taken down a peg or five might be no bad thing if we can replicate the social cohesion our parents felt as war ravaged their plans and often the lives of loved ones. Perhaps a resetting of the dial which indicates a different type of normal will be worth the transition.
It's the same 'suits' who decry the people out on the streets today in London protesting about climate change. Described as hair shirted, sandal wearing hippies they are demonised for holding up the traffic and holding up temporally the flow of life as the suits see life. 
Money defines us and if my coining it in today is in danger of being disrupted then all the facts of future ecological damage will fall on deaf ears. Money distorts the rational need of getting along with others, it triggers the worst instincts and searches for that overt obsequence to trigger a feeling of exceptionalism. It sets 'them' apart from 'us' and in doing so they lose the herd instinct for danger and assume the money will buy a plot somewhere near the last oasis. 
Of course Mad Max depicted the world where the majority were kept outside the city gate, a little like the gated suburbs in South Africa, where the 'whites' feel marginally secure at night, it's a price they are willing to pay psychologically knowing that exceptionalism comes at a high social cost.
The derisive comments made by some of our political leaders, particularly that thug Putin in Russia and his mate Trump in the US, regarding Greta Thunberg and her impassioned plea in the United Nations for the need for immediate action to combat global warming, was that of a closed mind who feel their exceptionalism will be sufficient to mitigate any effect on them.
Power and money, are two things we will probably never acquire so we better turn elsewhere for salvation.