I am having problems getting started with this piece on, ironically, powerlessness. Maybe this is nature's way of saying that is everyone is better of if I am powerless, because I would not make good use of my power. But I'm not better off, I'm worse off. I tell you what, how about if I just tell you the story?

We moved into this top-floor flat and the roof started to leak. It quickly got so cold and damp and mouldy in our bedroom that we slept on the floor in our lounge every night. The bedroom became an area we stored stuff in. And nobody seemed to want to do anything. What happened over the next six months is that everybody told us we could take legal action against our landlady, but not the freeholder who was responsible for repairing the roof. We didn't want to sue our own landlady, because upsetting the person who owns your home means that pretty quickly they will stop letting you live there. The work was done eventually, but in the interim we lost possessions to mould and damp, spent a fortune on electricity to keep the place warm and dry, and I occupied my evenings cleaning mould off the bedroom walls so my wife didn’t have an asthma attack. At the end of all this, the landlady told us to leave.

What makes me angry, very angry, is that what she is doing is totally legal. What makes me angrier is that we have very little recourse to making her pay for the stress, expense and damage caused by her failure to live up to her obligations. What makes me incredibly angry is that this is just private renting in Great Britain. I could go on and on about this for ages, but the bottom line really is that I feel powerless and that makes me feel like a child, totally at the mercy of the whims of the grownups.

In the culture I live in there are various dividing lines of power which run along racial, ethnic, social, gender and various other lines. I am fortunate enough to be on the powerful side of all of these lines. I have read cases of black people being pulled over by the US police which sound more terrifying than I could ever imagine. I have heard accounts of assault and harassment from far more women than I could possibly have imagined. What if you had to fill out a form and realised that under 'gender' there was not an option for you?

What I am basically saying is that I have far fewer societal reasons to feel powerless than many and yet I do, and I do because just as we all secretly don't think we are proper grownups, many people sometimes feel powerless.

What you do with this of course is up to you. You can mask your anxietyby being louder and brasher and more outwardly self-confident than anyone else. You can trample on those around you with your billing demeanour and – just as an example – orange face. Or you could try and include people, be an ally, combine to be powerful like some sort of union. Instead of pulling the ladder up after you, you could pull other people up the ladder after you. That's up to you.

Benjaminpmoore

28.05.18 Front Page

Back Issue Page