The day the narrative changed

By julijuxtaposed  12.09.15

I’m so pleased, today.  I feel like I’m absorbing the collective surge of enormous hope and expectation.  It is a new day.  It feels like a miracle has occurred but, really, this shift has been dawning for a long, long time.  Not everyone wakes up together, of course but the election of Jeremy Corbyn, as the leader of the Opposition, heralds a discernible quickening.

Will Mr Corbyn have the personal and political capacity and resources for the momentous tasks ahead?  Will his Party’s dejecteds add yet another front for him to fight?  Will the media focus on the least relevant details of every political debate and gratuitously undermine his person?  Will journalicians serve public interest and present his narratives on the substances of his arguments or will they just filter for their confirmation bias, irrespective of merit or fault?  Aside from the first, I fear that I already know the answers.

It has always made me angry that Jeremy Corbyn was the only one to put himself forward because of what it revealed about the narrowness of the Parliamentary Party Mind.  How the Party and Establishment machines would dwarf him; how he would be painted as extreme, deluded and regressive.  It worries me, too, that so much ardent and desperate expectation is invested in him; that he is hoist on a saviour’s pedestal and may be pulled down by the disappointment and impatience of blind worship as readily as by his multitudinous opponents.  The battles ahead are numerous and will be vicious.  I don’t want to see the one man to stand for socio-economic decency and integrity made a scapegoat of fearful ignorance and I don’t want all the opportunities that his new status affords all of us to be thrown away, fighting distractions.

These fears abide.  But today?  Today, I see the tide turn.  Today, I anticipate breakthrough and shifts in consciousness.  I see a humanitarian public platform officially recognised and legitimized.  Today, I see the narrative space created for social justice and practical wisdom, old and new.  Today is for excitement and Hope.