Thoughts

Living in Fear

~ MKW Publishing ~ 3 Comments

My childhood growing up in the 80’s in the UK seemed to be filled with war, terrorism and espionage. Over three decades later I am still trying to make sense of a world fuelled by turmoil and greed. I didn’t have massively political parents, they moaned liked everyone else and picked a side. But didn’t really do anything, just talked a lot about what should be done.

My first few years of really being aware were in England and the back-end years of the cold war, the build up to the poll tax riots and very real threats and acts of Irish Terrorism from the IRA. I distinctly remember a certain bearded man (Gerry Adams if you don’t remember), who’s opinions were deemed so poisonous his voice wasn’t even allowed on television. Although the footage of him and someone else reading his words were okay.

The Lockerbie air disaster was a terrible event noted by all too and reminded us we were at threat from at home and abroad. Apparently. Details and the full story were as sketchy and hazy then as they are today. And as I do now, relied on the media to give me information and keep me updated of the terrifying world around me. And that made me think something may fall out of the sky at any moment and land on you. I wasn’t very comfortable flying after that.

The 90’s brought a very different and worrying way of life for me. We moved into the military with my mother’s third marriage and were instantly posted to Germany, around the time of the Berlin wall coming down. My step-father had served in Northern Ireland before he was with us and it made it all a bit more real. It was no longer just reports on the TV. We were in Germany, where it was very real. On reflection, I may have had a realism sensory overload from that point on and never fully recovered. As we left for Germany, the first Gulf war kicked off, followed quite closely by Bosnia. My early teenage years were to be a continuation it seemed of being surrounded by societal turmoil. My home life wasn’t entirely standard either, dysfunctional and erratic I would call it. But that can easily go unnoticed when you realise what goes on outside. The world was falling to pieces, what does it matter if your family does too?

Thrown in between were other things to be afraid of, murderers, viruses and catastrophic natural events and man-made ones threatened every year. The O-zone, solar flares, earthquakes, asteroids, tsunamis. It was endless. 

After that followed more wars and conflict, 9/11 and new laws and propaganda for what we were meant to be afraid of.  I have a feeling that being constantly bombarded (through choice sometimes) with the negative reality of human nature hasn’t helped me to be a happier person, but perhaps a better informed one. Mid-teens I kind of fell off the map for a bit, but when I realise what I was contending with, I’m just glad I made it through.

(c) K L Wicks

Enlight33

(c) K Wicks

Strange in the Sky…

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I am not entirely a believer. I read what people have seen, and have watched the programs about abductions and experiments. I take an interest in the idea that there may be something other than ourselves here, I’m just not sure that something is from somewhere else. There are dark, remote and barren regions on this land  and in the sea we have not yet begun to explore or understand.

I have seen a few strange lights in the night sky, that move far quicker than I would expect, or they don’t move for a time. Not alien, just out of place. Noticeable, but not explainable to my own mind. It’s hard to come to a conclusion based on just hearsay and other peoples experiences.

But then something happened, a first hand picture I took myself back in 2011. With not a notice of the actual content at first, I did not see this in the sky at the time. I wanted to take a picture of a colourful hedge in my garden, two tones in fact, green leaves with dark red leaves behind them, with the bright blue sky for contrast. Not a great pic, but not a bad one for its purpose. I took two photos on my phone a few seconds apart.

Photograph 1

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Photograph 2

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It took me about a week to get round to uploading and working out if I could make a nice sky edit from these. But on closer inspection, realised that in pic 1, there is an object that looks metallic but without wings. I have spent much time looking up and have seen glimpses of many planes, they are extremely noticeable in the day time sky, lets be honest. So the unusual thing to me was that I didn’t see this when taking a picture and it has disappeared within a second or two. By pic 2, the object is gone completely and in the top left hand corner there are two crows messing around, highlighting to me how different birds look to this – and the birds were quite a distance away.

Possibly UFO 2

Most ordinary planes I have seen take some amount to time to make their journey across the sky, and technically i didn’t even see it, not with my own eyes anyway. So I have to put this as a UFO, not an alien craft from another world, I couldn’t possibly presume that. But a flying craft of unknown origin to me. In fact there may be many explanations of what it might have been, but I just haven’t settled on one yet…

 

(c) K L Wicks

 

 

Society…

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The veil of technology has well and truly settled over us and we the people can barely keep up. It’s funny when you think about it, how in the age of information we know hardly anything. Because the information is now unsolicited, contrived, ego driven, littered with untruths and for anyone who can write code, there to tamper with. Although, previous information was decided by the few for the many and was not much better.

This is nothing new, we have had these concepts put forward for decades, conspiracy theorists and plotters alike are aware that there are those among us who do choose to conspire to deceive people. But being aware of this doesn’t change it.

But they are irrelevant in the bigger picture, the how, the who, the what. Because they all distract you from the why.

What they don’t want you to know, or more importantly what they don’t want you to do. To realise your position, to realise you have the ability to think for yourself, protect yourself and to understand what needs to be done for a better world.

They want you to be in fear, to not trust those around you or yourself, they want your compliance and they will do anything to get it. TV, drugs and manipulated news all play their part to feed you the information they want you to have, or to give you a social problem to tackle while they are busy deciding your future and fate.

But we feel oppressed, we feel the pressure of being herded like sheep and dulled down to fit into a Victorian model of society, of strange pleasantries and social order to which we must adhere or we are considered outcasts. Anarchists. I see them more as progressionists sometimes, the people who can see something so fundamentally wrong with the system that they must question its reason and function. How else can we consider ourselves a civilized society when we run with such an archaic underlying structure?

Anarchy is just a word, as they all are, but it’s the meaning the word implies that is important. It is a word of propaganda, given to mean a rising of the minority who don’t fit into the to system or answer to the call of a corrupt authority. By seeing it as progression-ism means some people trying to affect change, not collapse the whole system. But words can lead to ideas, and ideas can lead to change and that’s what they fear. They want to control you, want to monitor you and want to stop you…

Enlight33

(c) MKW Publishing 2017

Beyond Reasoning…

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I wonder a lot about things I will never know, too much time spent trying to rewrite the past or understand it. But it was what it was, it was how it was. I think I was always willing to accept it, but wanted to know what I was accepting. Wanted to try and work out why people left and didn’t come back, why people didn’t talk to each other and how it became such a mess. I thought I was equipped to deal with such issues. I though I could handle learning about my family, instead it’s raised more questions than i can find answers for. I like to work out the logic in things but sometimes you just have to accept, it is beyond reasoning.

Time has now taken it’s toll and we are fewer now, so the questions remain and once again become part of an unsolvable mystery…

enlight1-1

 

 

(c) K Wicks

 

 

 

Living Up To Expectations…

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I’m not sure if I had known it would have made a difference, but after I had almost completed my first publishing project I was made aware of other family members who were successful in the field of writing. I had wanted to write since I was six years old, and did, short stories and projects that made me feel satisfied and content. I did not always have support with these stories, often told my reading and writing of horror were a waste of time, I should be reading educational material or at least the classics. They did not entertain me at the time, so I chose horror, or sometimes I think horror chose me.

But my passion for writing continued and after a number of years immersed only in work, the need to write took over. The book was pretty much writing itself in my head so I thought I best put pen to paper (or open a new word file on the computer as is the way these days). Only when it was in the finishing stages of editing did I dare tell my closest family, my grandparents. They are well read people and I was so nervous about what they would think, but I gave them my manuscript and waited.

I hadn’t really comprehended how much their approval meant to me until they gave it. It was the green light I had been waiting for without even realizing it, to have the most critical people I knew pass me as acceptable or at least as having potential. It made my day. But then followed the reveal, did I know, he said, that multiple family members including my great uncle, for doing a play script which is still used today of Treasure Island, and my great aunt and her husband, both authors and he having been a journalist and correspondent for a very well heard of paper for years. Even my uncle had published a book.

For a moment I wasn’t sure what this meant, am I now expected to be a successful author like other members of the family, or was it just encouragement to show me it can be done. Either way, I then had to work out exactly who’s expectation was I really trying to live up to, theirs, or mine?…

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(c) K Wicks