Today, I spent most of the day working on a Kindle Single about the recent UK election. It is not a funny book, not a humorous mystery like Car Full of Death. It is, instead, a very real look at the miserable tactics the Tories employed to win this election.
Note: It can hardly be said that they won the election, as they gained only 36% of the national vote. But gerrymandering and jury-rigging won the day, and Cameron widened his goofy grin into a faux-angelic semblance of self-congratulation and has vowed to take the UK down the garden path.)
The Kindle Single is a compendium of Tory hubris and greed, an explication for the masses who wonder how the hell it happened. But enough about that. Two very different ideas came together this afternoon as I took a break with a cup of “Simon tea” (he's a Brit, and simply makes it better than this former Yank).
One idea was one also expressed by comedian Russell Brand. He tried mightily to help Labour win. When he saw that it was all over, and may well be all over for a great many Britons in the aftermath, he had a suggestion. Paraphrasing, he said that since so many of us are going to suffer greatly from the machinations of the Tory juggernaut, it would be essential for us all to be kind to each other and to help each other. I agree. But I add: And work to foil the Tories' plans and get them the hell out.
And then I was reading a book, Life Loves You: 7 Spiritual Practices to Heal Your Life, by American guru Louise Hay and British author Robert Holden. It is about loving oneself and watching all good things come as a result of that. Most people would think it is pie-in-the-sky, but I'm here to tell you—in all of my failures and my successes as well—that it isn't. It's the truth.
It is quantum physics. Briefly, there is no such thing as matter in the world. Everything is energy. Energy can never be destroyed, but only transformed. Thus, if one is spending one's energy being negative, one will draw to oneself that negativity's bosom buddies. If one spends energy being positive, then the friends of the positive will visit.
The fact that it doesn't work perfectly all the time is simply that we don't work it perfectly all the time. But that makes people think it's all woo-woo stuff and they ascribe lack of brains to anyone who does believe in it and use it.
I have used it quite imperfectly during my life, and quite sporadically. But when I did use it, it worked a treat. I wanted two horses; I got two horses. I wanted two major book deals; I got two major book deals. I wanted a lovely husband; I got a lovely husband. But between forays into thought control, I flounder along like everyone else, like everyone who has never followed the teachings of Louise Hay, Dr. Wayne Dyer, and the Science of Mind.
Using one's own thoughts, one cannot make anyone else do anything. It is one's own mind, and thus the attraction of things to oneself (or thrusting away of things no longer needed) that's key to this. So one cannot positively think David Cameron needs to discover a desert island, take himself off to it, and stay there forever and make it happen. It won't. Unless he wants it, and that is the stuff of fairy tales, I am afraid.
What isn't a fairy tale is what Brand says and what Hay says. Or, to put it in the proper order, what Hay says and what Brand says. One must love oneself first to love anyone else. So to be kind, we must be kind to ourselves first.
This is both hard and easy. It's quite easy when exterior events are going well, one has enough or more than enough and is not afraid.
But now we are afraid. We are quite sure that a great many of us are not going to have enough. Food bank use has already sky-rocketed in five years of Cameron; what can five more years bring? Plus, his gormless flunkeys have cut back on allotments, making it difficult even to grow food to save money, or, more basically, to have some food.
It seems to me we must do two things simultaneously. Actually three. We must, every single morning, get up and affirm that we are loveable, even if David Cameron has made it clear—by claiming a universal mandate he came nowhere close to winning—that he hates us. Forgive him. Don't forget; forgive.
Second, do something kind for someone suffering. If you have two loaves of bread, give one away. While that is often impractical, put a little something aside, as if you were saving for a church donation in days of old, to donate at the end of the week.
Third, bedevil the devils. Write one letter to the editor, sign one petition, point out one failure of David Cameron's execrable first term so that no one will forget. Once you've done it, forgive.
And plan on doing exactly the same tomorrow.
That won't change David Cameron, the gormless Michael Gove, ludicrous Boris Johnson (bucking for the Donald Trump Hairstyle-from-Hell Award and also, btw, a dual US citizen unless he has lately renounced) one little bit.
What it will change is your life and feelings about it (when we give to ourselves and especially to others, it is a major positive shift which has major positive results), and it will help others to get through this.
So, love yourself. Love your neighbour as yourself. Let the devils gather together where they may...but point out their liars. I mean lairs.