The talk of 15-minute cities and towns is gathering pace. Meetings, consultations, petitions and protests. Charts, projections and bottom-line targets. Just in case you hadn’t noticed, everything is being given a corporate makeover.
Every aspect of your life apparently needs to have an ‘institution’ overseeing it. But it was an online comment that made me think of this. Of about being stuck in those ‘zones’ with the type of people they do not want to really be around on a constant basis. Which made me think of school, and how you have to spend all your hours and weekdays mostly surrounded by hundreds of people you’re forced to spend time with. And then other aspects seemed to sounds similar too.
You have to ask permission to do things, trying to earn points and qualify for a standard you have been told to follow. A restricted regime where you are given your timetable, your zones and your meal times. You will also be given your meals of what they decide you can eat. You will be told when you can take trips or have fun, and be fined or punished if you don’t stick to their schedule.
Now think about the above, is that school, or is that a 15-minute zone? Hard to tell from where I sit. The similarities I find are many, and the first lockdown was quite possibly just a test. Not just of compliance, but of practicality, to see if they could swing it that everyone stays where they are. And I realised that even if on the whole people didn’t, they would tell you they did. To make people think it worked so that they went along with it as well, or that they at a minimum believed that the ‘authorities’ had the power to make people do as they were told.
Maybe they thought because most people had been through their system of being Institutionalised, it would just work. That people would fall back in line and remember their initial ‘training’. Expecting people to revert back to a childhood state of dependency and of being told what to do. Which is what I think is a big part of this, and I have mentioning it before too in Holding us back, but of trying to diminish people’s adult lives and responsibilities. Wanting them to be like little orphan Oliver, grubby and dishevelled with an empty bowl outstretched towards your ‘caregivers’, hoping they’ll throw you a crumb when you whisper the words ‘please Sir, can I have some more’.
And that’s possibly why some people appear belligerent and have been labelled Anti-everything. Just as the ‘trouble makers’ would have at school. But after we leave that system, hopefully some reflect on those years, and come to understand that people pressures and reactions to that strange enforced regime through childhood. And the ones who realised it was a waste of time and didn’t try to fit it? Well, seems they had the right idea after all. But even back then they did a good job on all of us to make us look down on bad attendance, people with bad grades, people with a bad attitude. Now I know what type of people set those attendance standards, grades and attitudes they wanted from children, I’m not so judgey.
So to me, it does seem as though they are just expanding the school system to be a bigger, more encompassing system that gets everyone. Where they can have you as part of their institutions for life, from cradle to grave in fact. Tied in, logged in and fully immersed in their financial, emotional, medical and technological future plans for you. Unless of course, you find you have other plans for yourself…
