'Common People' (inspiration from Jarvis Cocker)

A dream – one day, perhaps, ‘common people’, shall wake in the morning in a fine home, free health care, with funds available, and a guaranteed future income until death.

These ‘common people’ shall rise, leisurely, consider the days and weeks ahead in calm realisation that the world is their oyster. Perhaps a visit to the golf course, a drive in the country with some refreshment latter, a long weekend break in the Grand Hotel, learn a new skill from the free online university or even a trip abroad, (in a modern, fully featured vehicle), to take in the sun when it gets a little cold in their northerly location.

CST would like to be there, as a fly on the wall perhaps, to ask these lucky ‘common people’ if they felt special?  Special because these lucky people are history’s first common healthy, wealthy, free men and women of the human race.  The first ever ‘common people’ to have been rewarded with such enormous riches and freedoms.

The world has taken 3.5 Billion years to get the human race to the point where ‘common people’ already exist in large numbers and who already have this great wealth and freedom.  Consider the past – at no time have there been more than a handful of free and wealthy people, anywhere.  From an historical context these 'common people' are truly amazing – take any past era, and suggest this result to the ‘common people’ of the day.  For them to even consider that they could ever live better than their kings and queens (or dictators), would be considered ridiculous and utterly impossible.

It may not last long.  Today's ‘common people’s’ children may be much worse off.  From the vagaries of climate change, famine, water wars, migration wars, living within self-imposed ‘police states’ to help protect them from themselves, their lives could be very different.

So, if you are lucky enough to have been born at the right time within a western economy, lived a full life and now sit back in good health, with your guaranteed pension, nice house, comfortable car, with enough ready money to take off wherever you wish at a moments notice – perhaps awake each morning and consider how very lucky you are.

You are the culmination of millions and millions of people suffering in servitude, slavery, through pestilence, through endless wars, insecurity and with great effort and imagination, eventually leveraging the human race to its present state.  This long journey has provided you with very special gifts, consider this before moaning about the cold tea, the weather, the potholes, modern technology, the long wait at the surgery or the migrants.  Especially the migrants - many of whom are still fleeing from the horrors that our ancestors had to endure. 

Perhaps awake and say ‘what can I do today to help our children’s future’.  Awake and understand your immense place in the history of the world. Indeed possibly in the known universe, as the few, free, wealthy, educated, sentients – at least anywhere within our local Galaxy?