Suzanne Harrington: Banners reading ‘I Can’t Believe I Have To Protest This S**t’ are valid

Just bone dry olive groves, tiered into the hillsides. It’s like being in space — nobody can hear you scream with joy at the perfect nothingness of it all. You can feel your head emptying.

Until, that is, you turn on the wifi. Just to check your emails. Just a quick look in case anyone is missing you. Just to post a few photos — lemon trees, olive trees, sheep with bells. Just to see what people are up to. You can’t help yourself.

And then your head fills up again, like a burst pipe flooding the room.

Oh look, it’s Nigel Farage having a milkshake thrown all over him, as he talks about replacing the Tory party in the UK.

Some wag quips how the revolution will not be pasteurised. Oh look, it’s an Atlantic article about how Europe is terrified of a Trump re-election, after a momentary collective exhale courtesy of a sex professional from Louisiana.

Oh look, it’s the ongoing creep of creeping populism, as left slides to centre and centre lurches to right and right jackboots to far right, so that everything is tilted, skewed, tipping in the wrong direction.

It’s like watching something preventable yet potentially catastrophic happen in slow motion; political climate change, being fuelled and refuelled.

You might find yourself wanting to scream, except from frustration this time, and wonder if anybody remembers history class from school. Did we not study the rise of the far right in Europe the last time around? Did we not write endless essays about how it happened, the role of propaganda, the scapegoating of minorities?

Learn how to spell ugly words like Kristallnacht and Mussolini and read books like Homage to Catalonia or Alone in Berlin?

Now that all the old people who lived through European fascism are dead, do we really have to repeat the process again?

Only this time the US is leading the way, caging children and colonising women’s bodies, banning books like it’s 1933, trashing science, incarcerating 25% of the world’s prisoners, creating a cult around an unhinged wannabe-dictator.

On peace marches, you see banners reading ‘I Can’t Believe I Have To Protest This Shit’.

It’s valid statement. Are we really that amnesiac? Just because, unlike our grannies, we haven’t experienced the impact of fascism directly, does that mean it can’t happen to us? That it isn’t already happening? That we haven’t learned from the past?

I wish my head was filled with nothingness, rather than the ominous march of whatever it is that’s marching towards us while we distract ourselves with Love Island, or gag in our handbags at the thought of Rupert Murdoch on another wedding night.

Much rather a state of blissful ignorance. But how is that possible?

What do we do? Unplug forever, look the other way, pretend it’s not happening?