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“And Now They Want Our Votes”

by Eman Abdelhadi

August 20, 2024
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Eman Abdelhadi speaks at the Bodies Against Unjust Laws march in Chicago on Sunday, August 18. Photo by Steel Brooks

Eman Abdelhadi’s speech from the “Bodies Outside of Unjust Laws” demonstration on Aug. 18 in Chicago.

Chicago, we all know why we are here.

We are drowning, and our hearts are broken.

We are drowning in debt. In medical bills. In rising rents. In inflation.

We are under attack in this country. The Right has declared war on people of color, on trans people, on women. They are trying to dismantle our systems of education, trying to criminalize teaching Black history and the realities of racism, oppression and exploitation in this country.

They openly call for mass deportations and want to strip Black people of voter rights.

Demonstrators on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Photo by Steel Brooks.

Every year, the climate crisis kills more people of heat, of floods, of fires. Every year, the number of climate refugees at home and abroad climbs and climbs.

And in this moment of absolute disaster, of absolute crisis.

The American ruling class —the people descending on this city for the Democratic National Convention — have seen fit to spend our money on killing children in Gaza.

They have provided an infinite supply of bombs to destroy Gaza’s homes, its schools, its hospitals, its playgrounds, its mosques, its churches, its croplands, its infrastructure.

As the most powerful country on earth, they have bullied the rest of the world in the name of protecting a far-right government openly committing a genocide.

And now …

Now they want our votes.

They say they have earned them by showing a little more empathy towards those poor Palestinians they happened to kill.

Vice President Harris, we hear your shift in tone.

But …

Your tone will not resurrect the dead.

Your tone will not shelter the living.

Your tone will not pull bombs out of the sky.

Your tone is not enough.

Genocide Joe would still be on the ticket if it were not for this movement, for all of us. Our movement is one of the main reasons that you are now the Democratic candidate for President in the most powerful country on the planet.

You, Vice President Harris, get to run for office because we ousted your predecessor right here in these streets. But it was never just about him. It was about the 40,000 Palestinians he helped kill.

And now we are telling you that ​“Not the other guy” is not a platform.

We are telling you that you actually have to earn our votes.

And we are telling you exactly how to earn them.

We are telling you we want a weapons embargo.

We are telling you we want a permanent ceasefire.

And we are telling you that we want them NOW.

You keep telling us that democracy itself is on the line.

You keep telling us that fascism is knocking at the door.

You keep telling us that Trump would be worse.

But the majority of Americans, in poll after poll, say they disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Study after study shows that a weapons embargo would earn you more votes, would secure you this election.

Vice President Harris, why are you risking the end of democracy, the rise of fascism, the return of Trump to protect Netenyahu’s war on children?

You are not the protector of democracy.

We are the protectors of democracy.

If you want to see democracy, look to Chicago’s streets this week. We are democracy speaking back to power, saying we will not be ignored.

We want to house our unhoused.

We want to feed our hungry.

We want to heal our sick.

We want to guard our planet.

We want to build our future, not rob Gaza’s children of theirs.

You may think that the people who make it into the United Center today are the ones who get to shape the future of this country.

That’s not true.

We make the future of this country. We make it where we’ve always made it, right here on the streets.

Vice President Harris, you have a choice. You could join a movement for justice. You could make a place for yourself in history. You could be a leader who chose to listen to her people rather than the interests of the war manufacturers. Or you could aid and abet a war criminal.

Vice President Harris, if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, WE ARE SPEAKING.

Hear us. We will not be placated by tone.

We need you to act — and we will not leave the streets until you do.

This piece was published in collaboration with In These Times.

Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 – 2072.

Numerous Pro-Palestine Protestors Arrested

 Outside Consulate of Israel Chicago

by CounterPunch News Service

 August 21, 2024
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As former President Barack Obama prepared to speak at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on the evening of August 20, pro-Palestine protestors outside the Consulate General of Israel were arrested. Over sixty-six arrests were reported, including press members—photos by Steel Brooks.

Photo by Steel Brooks.

Photo by Steel Brooks.

Photo by Steel Brooks.

Photo by Steel Brooks.

Photo by Steel Brooks.

Photo by Steel Brooks.

 

Biden’s Convention Speech Made Absurd Claims About His Gaza Policy

by Norman Solomon Posted onAugust 21, 2024

An observation from George Orwell – “those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future” – is acutely relevant to how President Biden talked about Gaza during his speech at the Democratic convention Monday night. His words fit into a messaging template now in its eleventh month, depicting the U.S. government as tirelessly seeking peace, while supplying the weapons and bombs that have enabled Israel’s continual slaughter of civilians.

“We’ll keep working, to bring hostages home, and end the war in Gaza, and bring peace and security to the Middle East,” Biden told the cheering delegates. “As you know, I wrote a peace treaty for Gaza. A few days ago I put forward a proposal that brought us closer to doing that than we’ve done since October 7th.”

It was a journey into an alternative universe of political guile from a president who just six days earlier had approved sending $20 billion worth of more weapons to Israel. Yet the Biden delegates in the convention hall responded with a crescendo of roaring admiration.

Applause swelled as Biden continued: “We’re working around-the-clock, my secretary of state, to prevent a wider war and reunite hostages with their families, and surge humanitarian health and food assistance into Gaza now, to end the civilian suffering of the Palestinian people and finally, finally, finally deliver a ceasefire and end this war.”

In Chicago’s United Center, the president basked in adulation while claiming to be a peacemaker despite a record of literally making possible the methodical massacres of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Orwell would have understood. A political reflex has been in motion from top U.S. leaders, claiming to be peace seekers while aiding and abetting the slaughter. Normalizing deception about the past sets a pattern for perpetrating such deception in the future.

And so, working inside the paradigm that Orwell described, Biden exerts control over the present, strives to control narratives about the past, and seeks to make it all seem normal, prefiguring the future.

The eagerness of delegates to cheer for Biden’s mendaciously absurd narrative about his administration’s policies toward Gaza was in a broader context – the convention’s lovefest for the lame-duck president.

Hours before the convention opened, Peter Beinart released a short video essay anticipating the fervent adulation. “I just don’t think when you’re analyzing a presidency or a person, you sequester what’s happened in Gaza,” he said. “I mean, if you’re a liberal-minded person, you believe that genocide is just about the worst thing that a country can do, and it’s just about the worst thing that your country can do if your country is arming a genocide.”

Beinart continued: “And it’s really not that controversial anymore that this qualifies as a genocide. I read the academic writing on this. I don’t see any genuine scholars of human rights international law who are saying it’s not indeed there… If you’re gonna say something about Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, you have to factor in what Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, has done, vis-à-vis Gaza. It’s central to his legacy. It’s central to his character. And if you don’t, then you’re saying that Palestinian lives just don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter this particular day, and I think that’s inhumane. I don’t think we can ever say that some group of people’s lives simply don’t matter because it’s inconvenient for us to talk about them at a particular moment.”

Underscoring the grotesque moral obtuseness from the convention stage was the joyful display of generations as the president praised and embraced his offspring. Joe Biden walked off stage holding the hand of his cute little grandson, a precious child no more precious than any one of the many thousands of children the president has helped Israel to kill.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including War Made Easy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in 2023 by The New Press.

 

Nothing’s Changed Since 1948 – Except Now Israel’s Excuses Don’t Work

We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel. It was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin

by Jonathan Cook Posted onAugust 20, 2024

The headline above, about yet another Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the tiny, besieged and utterly destroyed enclave of Gaza, was published in last week’s Middle East Eye.

When I began studying Israeli history more than a quarter of a century ago, people claiming to be experts proffered plenty of excuses to explain why Israelis should not be held responsible for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes – what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe.

1. I was told most Israelis were not involved and knew nothing of the war crimes carried out against the Palestinians during Israel’s establishment.

2. I was told that those Israelis who did take part in war crimes, like Operation Broom to expel Palestinians from their homeland, did so only because they were traumatised by their experiences in Europe. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, these Israelis assumed that, were the Jewish people to survive, they had no alternative but to drive out the Palestinians en masse.

3. From others, I was told that no ethnic cleansing had taken place. The Palestinians had simply fled at the first sign of conflict because they had no real historical attachment to the land.

4. Or I was told that the Palestinians’ displacement was an unfortunate consequence of a violent war in which Israeli leaders had the best interests of Palestinians at heart. The Palestinians hadn’t left because of Israeli violence but because they has been ordered to do so by Arab leaders in the region. In fact, the story went, Israel had pleaded with many of the 750,000 refugees to come home afterwards, but those same Arab leaders stubbornly blocked their return.

Every one of these claims was nonsense, directly contradicted by all the documentary evidence.

That should be even clearer today, as Israel continues the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of the Palestinian people more than 75 years on.

1. Every Israeli knows exactly what is going on in Gaza – after all, their children-soldiers keep posting videos online showing the latest crimes they have committed, from blowing up mosques and hospitals to shooting randomly into homes. Polls show all but a small minority of Israelis approve of the savagery that has killed many tens of thousands of Palestinians, including children. A third of them think Israel needs to go further in its barbarity.

Today, Israeli TV shows host debates about how much pain soldiers should be allowed to inflict by raping their Palestinian captives. Don’t believe me? Watch this from Israel’s Channel 12:

2. If the existential fears of Israelis and Jews still require the murder, rape and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians three-quarters of a century on from the Holocaust, then we need to treat that trauma as the problem – and refuse to indulge it any longer.

3. The people of Gaza are fleeing their homes – or at least the small number who still have homes not bombed to ruins – not because they lack an attachment to Palestine. They are fleeing from one part of the cage Israel has created for them to another part of it for one reason alone: because all of them – men, women and children – are terrified of being slaughtered by an Israeli military, at best, indifferent to their suffering and their fate.

4. No serious case can be made today that Israel is carrying out any of its crimes in Gaza – from bombing civilians to starving them – with regret, or that its leaders seek the best for the Palestinian population. Israel is on trial for genocide at the world’s highest court precisely because the judges there suspect it has the very worst intentions possible towards the Palestinian people.

We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel. It was always a settler colonial project. And like other settler colonial projects – from the US and Australia to South Africa and Algeria – it always viewed the native people as inferior, as non-human, as animals, and was bent on their elimination.

What is so obviously true today was true then too, at Israel’s birth. Israel was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin.

We in the West abetted its crimes in 1948, and we’re still abetting them today. Nothing has changed, except the excuses no longer work.

Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This originally appeared in the Jonathan Cook’s Substack.

 

From Agrarianism to Transhumanism: The Long March to Dystopia

by Colin Todhunter / August 18th, 2024

A total demolition of the previous forms of existence is underway: how one comes into the world, biological sex, education, relationships, the family, even the diet that is about to become synthetic.

— Silvia Guerini, radical ecologist, in From the ‘Neutral’ Body to the Posthuman Cyborg: A Critique of Gender Ideology (2023)

We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world. [1]

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and big financial institutions, like BlackRock and Vanguard, are also involved, whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland,  pushing biosynthetic (fake) food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating and financing the aims of the mega agri-food corporations. [2]

The billionaire interests behind this try to portray their techno-solutionism as some kind of humanitarian endeavour: saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, ‘helping farmers’ or ‘feeding the world’. But what it really amounts to is repackaging and greenwashing the dispossessive strategies of imperialism.

It involves a shift towards a ‘one world agriculture’ under the control of agritech and the data giants, which is to be based on genetically engineered seeds, laboratory created products that resemble food, ‘precision’ and ‘data-driven’ agriculture and farming without farmers, with the entire agrifood chain, from field (or lab) to retail, being governed by monopolistic e-commerce platforms determined by artificial intelligence systems and algorithms.

Those who are pushing this agenda have a vision not only for farmers but also for humanity in general.

The elites through their military-digital-financial (Pentagon/Silicon Valley/Big Finance) complex want to use their technologies to reshape the world and redefine what it means to be human. They regard humans, their cultures and their practices, like nature itself, as a problem and deficient.

Farmers are to be displaced and replaced with drones, machines and cloud-based computing. Food is to be redefined and people are to be fed synthetic, genetically engineered products. Cultures are to be eradicated, and humanity is to be fully urbanised, subservient and disconnected from the natural world.

What it means to be human is to be radically transformed. But what has it meant to be human until now or at least prior to the (relatively recent) Industrial Revolution and associated mass urbanisation?

To answer this question, we need to discuss our connection to nature and what most of humanity was involved in prior to industrialisation — cultivating food.

Many of the ancient rituals and celebrations of our forebears were built around stories, myths and rituals that helped them come to terms with some of the most fundamental issues of existence, from death to rebirth and fertility. These culturally embedded beliefs and practices served to sanctify their practical relationship with nature and its role in sustaining human life.

As agriculture became key to human survival, the planting and harvesting of crops and other seasonal activities associated with food production were central to these customs.

Humans celebrated nature and the life it gave birth to. Ancient beliefs and rituals were imbued with hope and renewal and people had a necessary and immediate relationship with the sun, seeds, animals, wind, fire, soil and rain and the changing seasons that nourished and brought life. Our cultural and social relationships with agrarian production and associated deities had a sound practical base.

People’s lives have been tied to planting, harvesting, seeds, soil and the seasons for thousands of years.

Silvia Guerini, whose quote introduces this article, notes the importance of deep-rooted relationships and the rituals that re-affirm them. She says that through rituals a community recognises itself and its place in the world. They create the spirit of a rooted community by contributing to rooting and making a single existence endure in a time, in a territory, in a community.

Professor Robert W Nicholls explains that the cults of Woden and Thor were superimposed on far older and better-rooted beliefs related to the sun and the earth, the crops and the animals and the rotation of the seasons between the light and warmth of summer and the cold and dark of winter.

Humanity’s relationship with farming and food and our connections to land, nature and community has for millennia defined what it means to be human.

Take India, for example. Environmental scientist Viva Kermani says that Hinduism is the world’s largest nature-based religion that:

… recognises and seeks the Divine in nature and acknowledges everything as sacred. It views the earth as our Mother and hence advocates that it should not be exploited. A loss of this understanding that earth is our mother, or rather a deliberate ignorance of this, has resulted in the abuse and the exploitation of the earth and its resources.

Kermani notes that ancient scriptures instructed people that the animals and plants found in India are sacred and, therefore, all aspects of nature are to be revered. She adds that this understanding of, and reverence towards, the environment is common to all Indic religious and spiritual systems: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

According to Kermani, the Vedic deities have deep symbolism and many layers of existence. One such association is with ecology. Surya is associated with the sun, the source of heat and light that nourishes everyone; Indra is associated with rain, crops, and abundance; and Agni is the deity of fire and transformation and controls all changes.

She notes that the Vrikshayurveda, an ancient Sanskrit text on the science of plants and trees, contains details about soil conservation, planting, sowing, treatment, propagating, how to deal with pests and diseases and a lot more.

Like Nicholls, Kermani provides insight into some of the profound cultural, philosophical and practical aspects of humanity’s connection to nature and food production.

This connection resonates with agrarianism, a philosophy based on cooperative labour and fellowship, which stands in stark contrast to the values and impacts of urban life, capitalism and technology that are seen as detrimental to independence and dignity. Agrarianism, too, emphasises a spiritual dimension as well as the value of rural society, small farms, widespread property ownership and political decentralisation.

The prominent proponent of agrarianism Wedell Berry says:

The revolution which began with machines and chemicals now continues with automation, computers and biotechnology.

For Berry, agrarianism is not a sentimental longing for a time past. Colonial attitudes, domestic, foreign and now global, have resisted true agrarianism almost from the beginning — there has never been fully sustainable, stable, locally adapted, land-based economies.

However, Berry provides many examples of small (and larger) farms that have similar output as industrial agriculture with one third of the energy.

In his poem ‘A Spiritual Journey’, Berry writes the following:

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.

But in the cold, centralised, technocratic dystopia that is planned, humanity’s spiritual connection to the countryside, food and agrarian production are to be cast into the dustbin of history.

Silvia Guerini says [3]:

The past becomes something to be erased in order to break the thread that binds us to a history, to a tradition, to a belonging, for the transition towards a new uprooted humanity, without past, without memory… a new humanity dehumanised in its essence, totally in the hands of the manipulators of reality and truth.

This dehumanised humanity severed from the past is part of the wider agenda of transhumanism. For instance, we are not just seeing a push towards a world without farmers and everything that has connected us to the soil but, according to Guerini, also a world without mothers.

She argues that those behind test-tube babies and surrogate motherhood now have their sights on genetic engineering and artificial wombs, which would cut women out of the reproductive process. Guerini predicts that artificial wombs could eventually be demanded, or rather marketed, as a right for everyone, including transgender people. It is interesting that the language around pregnancy is already contested with the omission of ‘women’ from statements like ‘persons who can get pregnant’.

Of course, there has long been a blurring of lines between biotechnology, eugenics and genetic engineering. Genetically engineered crops, gene drives and gene editing are now a reality, but the ultimate goal is marrying artificial intelligence, bionanotechnology and genetic engineering to produce the one-world transhuman.

This is being pushed by powerful interests, who, according to Guerini, are using a rainbow, transgenic left and LGBTQ+ organisations to promote a new synthetic identity and claim to new rights. She says this is an attack on life, on nature, on “what is born, as opposed to artificial” and adds that all ties to the real, natural world must be severed.

It is interesting that in its report Future of Food, the UK supermarket giant Sainsburys celebrates a future where we are microchipped and tracked and neural laces have the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms that could work out exactly what food (delivered by drone) we need to support us at a particular time in our life. All sold as ‘personal optimisation’.

Moreover, it is likely, according to the report, that we will be getting key nutrients through implants. Part of these nutrients will come in the form of lab-grown food and insects.

A neural lace is an ultra-thin mesh that can be implanted in the skull, forming a collection of electrodes capable of monitoring brain function. It creates an interface between the brain and the machine.

Sainsburys does a pretty good job of trying to promote a dystopian future where AI has taken your job, but, according to the report, you have lots of time to celebrate the wonderful, warped world of ‘food culture’ created by the supermarket and your digital overlords.

Technofeudalism meets transhumanism — all for your convenience, of course.

But none of this will happen overnight. And whether the technology will deliver remains to be seen. Those who are promoting this brave new world might have overplayed their hand but will spend the following decades trying to drive their vision forward.

But arrogance is their Achilles heel.

There is still time to educate, to organise, to resist and to agitate against this hubris, not least by challenging the industrial food giants and the system that sustains them and by advocating for and creating grass-root food movements and local economies that strengthen food sovereignty.

NOTES:

[1] See the author’s open-access e-book Food, Dispossession and Dependency: Resisting the New World Order here (Academia.edu), here (heyzine.com) or here (Centre for Research on Globalization)

[2] See the author’s open-access e-book Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth here (Academia.edu) , here (heyzine.com) or here (Centre for Research on Globalization)

[3] A debt of gratitude is owed to Paul Cudenec and his article Truth, reality, tradition and freedom: our resistance to the great uprooting on the Winter Oak website, which provides quotes from and insight into the work of Silvia Guerini.

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Colin Todhunter is an independent writer specialising in development, food and agriculture. You can read his new e-book Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order for free here. Read other articles by Colin.

 

Wellness as Tyranny: The Cult of Toxic Happiness

by Binoy Kampmark / August 18th, 2024

Be happy.  Think of your wellness.  Across organisations, private and public entities, government bodies and social clubs, the cult of contrived happiness abounds with ritualistic, clotting repetition.  In such cases, the forced grin, the pressured smile, the affected giggle, have become part of a project of puppeteering, manipulation and manufacture.  Critics of such approaches are ostracised, treated as leprous reminders of reality.

The cult of orchestrated happiness is intended to veil, covering the moonscape scars and lingering mutilations of life.  The forced smile, as it has so often been, repels reality.  It is also intended as a transferral of responsibility for problems one complains about to the complainant.  To be happy by design is to excuse defect and injustice, casually skipping over larger imperfections.  “Toxic positivity,” writes Mita Mallick, “is the idea that no matter how bad or stressful a situation, no matter how difficult the circumstances are, you can change your outcome simply by being positive and thinking positively.”

Mallick goes on to suggest that when toxic positivity, as a practice, makes its unwelcome appearance, “we put the responsibility on individuals to endure and persevere in toxic, dysfunctional and broken structures and systems.”  Negative views are shunned, seen as unhelpful and disruptive.  Their holders, in turn, are encouraged to feel shame, guilt and cherish immaturity.

The nature of such forced happiness has become industrialised and marketed.  Rina Raphael, who has studied the wellness industry, notes its effects on certain groups as well.  Women, she argues, are being sedated “with consumerist self-care”.  Stress can be banished as an act of faith and salvation, dispelled through yoga classes or taking soothing bubble baths.  The actual culprit – the issue of overwork, for instance – can be ignored.  Even more critically, forget the collective dimension at play, which the wellness market reduces to a matter of individual action and choice.

Tim Lott also reminds us that this has roots in a specific understanding of economic organisation.  He takes the prod to capitalism, where happiness is aim and object, involving shopping, playing, exercising, granting funds to charity and such.  Companies ensure that workplaces include gimmicks, distractions, and treats in the name of building the resilience of their worker bees: the workplace, for instance, modelled on a nightclub, with open bars and zones of mandatory tranquillity.  The workplace, monitored by such creepily absurd commissars as the “funsultants”, have become a domain for the wellness police, agents of what the late Barbara Ehrenreich called the “epidemic of wellness”.

Ehrenreich, in her snappy book Natural Causes, offered a mischievous critique of such an epidemic in the context of postponing death.  “You can think of death bitterly or with resignation … and take every possible measure to postpone it.”  On the other hand, “you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.”  Sober words of philosophical sting which, sadly, have done little to arrest the growth of the wellness industry.

Toxic happiness, the cult of happiness, has become an imperative of iron clad worth.  Carl Cederström and André Spicer note in The Wellness Syndrome that even the most mundane tasks of the day must be seen as acts of improvement and wellness.  “When we engage in boring activities, such as washing up at home, we should think of them as improving our mindfulness.  Even baking a loaf of bread is now recast as a way of nurturing our wellbeing.”

The cult of forced happiness acts as a conscious program to defang and dilute opposition, maligning critics who refuse to join the fascists of the grin, the authoritarians of the forced smiled.  It stiffens the sinews of groupthink and discourages naysayers who wish to challenge organisational behaviour or correct errors.  Whistleblowers worried about reporting corporate malfeasance or criminality in government organisations find themselves hounded and scolded for not being loyal in patriotic silence.  They should have tasted wellness and its therapeutic properties.  To be unhappy, it follows, is to be critical and dangerously free.

Wellness as a principle of organisational behaviour has also become a rigid legal component.  Employers remind their employees that they must take time off, rush off on annual leave and ensure that the organisation does not labour under “liabilities” that will cut into budgets and raise questions about the quality of the workplace.  Most cringingly of all, many employers insist that the public holiday becomes the perfect point at which to take that leave.

Unhappiness has become the hunted enemy, and stomped upon.  The time has come for a constructive sense of informed unhappiness to take over, the sulky, the gravely sullen and the profoundly introspective to have their time in necessary bleakness.  Wellness industry, begone!FacebookTwitterReddit

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.