Looking back over my birthdays across every decade of the 40 years of my adulthood shows with hindsight how much the world I thought we were making has changed for the worse — and is changing for the even worse – how far it has veered away from those years of hope that marked my youth.
Over these years, the sustained disinterest of governments and people with power and privilege in addressing the basic needs of most people in our society has drip-fed a populism that has now boiled to the surface.It feels hard to admit that three-quarters of my life and experience is over and that I am now in my twilight years. People tell you not to think that way; that there’s life after 60. Of course, there is – if you are privileged.
In England, despite – or perhaps because of – the best efforts of Margaret Thatcher, it was a year of rising protest and resistance.That year found me back in Johannesburg , barely a month after the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first democratic president.The wider world was in a period of rapid and revolutionary democratic expansion, with a revival of the idea that human rights and the rule of law should be at the centre of governance universally.
In 2002 we had won a now-famous victory in the Constitutional Court and, under pressure from our continuing protests, the government had agreed to a national treatment plan that included access to antiretroviral medicines. We didn’t see it that way at the time, but Michael’s death is symbolic of what the neo-liberal era was doing to erode poor people’s hopes of basic dignity and equality; hopes that had broken like a wave in the 1990s, and particularly after freedom in 1994.
Despite the small victories and meaningful engagements, what felt more and more like a performative theatre of opposition by civil society began to give me less and less hope.Suddenly I can count 40 years of political activism for human rights behind me, with many significant victories. I should feel content.Because politics and the hope that we shall overcome has been much of my life, it is the darkest time.
On top of all this, the climate crisis – a notion completely unfamiliar to my youth in the 1980s – is a gathering storm that will rain on all our freedoms.
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