I've been thinking a lot recently about hope. About how radical and nourishing it can be, but how, on the flip side, we can be conditioned to be hopeless by those who seek to gain power over us. I then turn my gaze to our media and cultural landscape right now... Have you ever tried to watch something on Netflix-only to find that you can't find anything that does NOT have a narrative of dystopia, of corruption and despair? Have you noticed how difficult it is to find media that shows us an optimistic future? One of hope, growth and nourishment? It feels like the age we're in right now has gotten so bleak, so barren of an alternative, that we've even lost our imagination for an alternative future. It feels like, right now, all we can conceptualise is things continuing to get worse.

Trust me, I get it. Billionaire vermin are ruling the world. They're dodging our tax systems and sucking our economies dry. They're buying up our assets and leaving us without housing, without healthcare, without affordable living. The climate is collapsing at the behest of these people too, and it feels like there's few capable of stopping them. For a lot of us, our communities have been ravaged by hypercapitalist neoliberal ideology. Our towns and cities have been turned into car dependent hellscapes, our precious community spaces have been ripped away from us by the rich with their "property portfolios". Worse yet, the little money we do have- mostly ends up going into the pockets of billion dollar international corporations who don't even pay their taxes, that money doesnt even reinvest back to the local economy. We get home from our ever understaffed workplace, exhausted and to barely make ends meet, scarcely being able to put food on the table. All while your bosses celebrate their year on year profit growth and gains. And if you're a marginalised person? Don't get me started on the roll back of rights, growing societal hate and exclusion. I'm barely even scratching the surface.

BUT- as true as all this is... The people setting fire to our communities, siphening the value of our labour for profit, dodging taxes, ruining the housing market and destroying our climate- all they want is for us to be so entrenched in this "reality" that they've constructed so that we can't even begin to imagine an alternative. They want us locked into fight our flight 24/7, apart from each other, away from community (why else would our towns and cities be designed to keep us so apart from each other?), and in poverty. That way, the act of even imagining a better future seems fanciful, frivolous and overly idealistic. They are relying on you giving up, they desperately hope that you'll disengage all together and keep suffering at worst, or to turn against your neighbours and minority groups at best... All while they continue to get richer and make your lives a living hell.

Just imagine what we'd all be capable of if we had a shared vision of hope? A shared vision of better institutions. A vision of climate justice, one not of car centered hellscapes that drive us apart, but walkable, green and beautiful cities that bring us together. Policies and institutions that put people before profit: better wages, lower rent and cost of living. Being able to live in places where there are thriving, accessible high streets bursting with local businesses, where money spent goes back to the local economy, not to a billionaires fit to bursting pocket. Infrastructure to provide free public transport. Reliable busses, trains and trams with varied and regular services throughout our neighbourhoods. Imagine being able to leave the door without spending a penny just to see your friend at your favourite coffee shop? Imagine being able to find a seat on a train, where you can sit in comfort knowing that you're not putting yet more money into the money pit of some private rail company.