I came to make a film

….thinking I would not really want to get involved in the protest, I haven’t seen myself as an activist for a long time. I was a Greenham Common baby, I remember my mother taking me up there and I so wanted to sleep under a plastic sheet! She would never let me of course and I had to sleep in the car. I also remember chatting to a man across the fence while I was eating my porridge in the morning and wondering why we were protesting when the people behind the fence were so nice.
I now understand what we were doing there and the reason that my mother asked him if he would have to kill her and why he would do that. I was scared at the time, thinking that my mother was going to die. I am now even more scared, but for my own life and the life of our beautiful planet which has given us so much when we have given her so little.
Blair has decided, with the help of the Tories, that we should pay much of our tax money to pay for another nuclear missile scheme that we will never use. Why will we never use it? Because we are scared for ourselves and we know that if we do then another one will be pointed straight back at us.
When I was little, my bathroom was wallpapered with activist slogans and the one I remember the most was ‘stop the world, I want to get off’. Recently I have started an MA in youth work and community development, of which many of the modules focus on oppression and exclusion and how to tackle it. This course has made me reassess where I stand, how I feel about politics and government, what I know about the way this country is run, what I believe about how the country should be run and what I want to do about it. Every time I read about oppressive societies and what it would take to stop oppression or to put a halt to capitalism I have felt the slogans come back to me. Stop this world, I REALLY want to leave now!
I often dream of my own little island where bombs don’t exist, people learn things because they want to, people farm to create their own food and it does not go to waste because it is picked as it is needed, I have a big beach I can fly my kite on and I don’t need insurance because accidents are no-ones fault, the community works together and respects each other. The only problem with my island is that I would want everyone to come with me!
The people I met this weekend have made me see my island as here and my people as you. I want this to happen, but I want it to happen here, not in some distant place.
I left knowing that I will be back in Faslane to support and I have been trying to think of ingenious ways of how to lock on ever since I got on the bus home. My colleague, who also does not see herself as an activist and has never been to any protest before, is also talking of coming too.

I would like to say ‘thank you’ to all the people who made this happen and those who risked arrest and got arrested for showing me the courage and determination that I feel I have been lacking in my life for a long time. We can change the world and follow in the footsteps of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Angie and all of the individuals who have contributed to the better things we see in life today.

P.S.
This morning Noel Gallagher said that he is pissed off with politicians and is thinking of running for parliament himself. I think I will join his party and run along side him, maybe an amazing Mrs Pritchard is the only way to get this country into a state which we can all be proud of, rather than the commercialist, capitalist and conformist society we now live in and which I am personally ashamed to be a part of.