page_4

“As you pass from the soft years of youth into harsh, hardening manhood, be sure you take with you on the way all the humane emotions, do not leave them on the road: you will not pick them up again afterwards.”

Nikolai Gogol

THE EDITOR’S NOTE

When the time came to conceptualise this issue, I originally set out to do something attuned to nature. It’s Spring, though the weather here in England may disagree, and it’s a time of refreshment, regeneration, and rebirth. The trees start to flower and everything looks a little less like the set of a 1920s Weimar expressionist film. However, what I came to realise, as I started to collate little tidbits for consideration, was that whatever I could write about, whatever I could explore that related to the great outdoors, felt quite disingenuous. There’s a film – you’ll find our coverage of it just past halfway in this issue – that explores radical action against climate change through engaging in a loud act of violence towards oil corporations that mirrors the violence they’re committing to the environment each day. They denounce peaceful protests as inaction. It’s a good film, really good, because it doesn’t equate environmentalism to far off rainforests or distant weather phenomena, no, it equates it to the human life affected by severe climate change. Cancer. Natural disasters. Homelessness and displacement. And while I was able to understand the message of the film, I couldn’t allow myself to be all that hopeful about its existence. Because, well, empathy to others feels all at once everything we need and a lost cause for many. 

At a time of crisis, the world was quick to divide, then countries were fractured further. Like a piece of shattered glass with razor sharp edges, the world and all its ideologies have continue to attacked itself until we’ve all been left tinged red from the blood. And there’s no aftercare, no, instead it’s a survival instinct of rugged individualism that pushes those who are more cut up to the side and waits eagerly for them to bleed out. Waste away. Die. All from incisions made by a fractured nation. Those responsible for the divisions are never held accountable. Instead, they stoke the flames of fury and encourage the vox populi to villainise refugees, transgender people, people of colour, and they tell them that it’ll keep them safe, that it’ll preserve their comforts,
that it’ll save them from the inevitable cull. 

It’s despicable, what this culture of fear has done, not only to the so-called United Kingdom but so many other nations across the world. That blasted empathy, it’s now become political, and those who stretch it too much are weak or woke, and those who shrug off the despair of others are confident and assured. Myself and my colleagues detest this attitude, that care for others has become a campaign call.
So we’ve revolted against it. 

This issue isn’t about nature, no, it’s about it’s about defiance. It’s about looking beyond what you’re told. It’s about finding new lands and new philosophies. It’s about human connection. It’s about love. It’s about goddamn empathy.
So if we’re going to save the fucking world, let’s save everyone in it too.

BETH BENNETT

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF