Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 64

We are turning into a nation--and possibly a world--of scared, personality-less puritans who live small lives, the perameters of which are dictated by unexamined fears, idiot suspicions and external authorities whose right to control us we no longer have the brains to question. And every time I go to a training course I confront the reality of this in a little greater detail. Sitting there--as near to the back as one can get in a convivial discussion circle--I feel a kind of nausea about the dreadful failure of the human race to live up to its colossal potential: we have minds capable of spanning universes in a micro-second, and yet we are racing blindly into a future defined by cowardly obedience and puritanism. Every time I learn again about not sharing my workplace problems with my lover because of Data Protection or The Correct 20-Second Hand-Washing Method, I think of my other life as a poet and (in Ginsberg's words) "an unofficial bastard of nature" and wonder what in god's name I'm doing there. And then I remember. Money.
Bruce Hodder
SUFFOLK PUNCH (vol.iii)