Waking up to reality

Or waking up to a nightmare?

I saw a placard held up among the protests being made in Cyprus before the agreement was reached the other day.

It read:

"Let us dream".

I know where you are coming from. At the same time, as a pragmatist I would suggest that we need to stay awake, be aware, and avoid any more of the nightmares that have been imposed upon us in the past few years.

A healthy degree of scepticism is needed to deal with what is thrown at us. We need solutions that work for all of us, we need practical solutions that will get us through the dark days we are currently going through and emerge into a better tomorrow.

If you can dream, if you can idealise upon what is needed, then I will not discourage you, but you had better be able to put proverbial meat upon the proverbial bones.

I have heard all the idealism that I can just about stomach over this too-long existence of mine. If that sounds cynical, I am sorry, but those ideas from whichever flank they came from have created the mess we now have.

Why did the "free market" solution of which many were so fond in the 1980s create the misery that we now have? Surely that should not have happened. Wharrever happened to the Socialist better world promised by so many countries in the post-war world? Why did it not protect us from the current nightmare?

Both were flawed? Too right.

Neither could work? The evidence is all around us.

So if we are to dream, let us dream in real terms, and work towards goals that can be achieved and will work - and not just for the few, but the many.

One of the reasons that the 2008 crash and the consequent nightmares occurred was that we were proverbially asleep. Like Cassandra in ancient Troy, some (like myself) had seen this coming for a long time. Like with Cassandra's predictions in ancient Troy, few people were prepared to listen and believe that things could go wrong.

Then people woke up.

The next time it will be better not to dream, or even to fall asleep. There is so much more to be said for staying awake - and alert!