Do you know the true cost of this?

I am worried about this town.

At the time we first got the news that Essex County Council were going to stop the Square from being a live venue, the Head of the Youth Service in Harlow stated that the Square wasn’t closing as such, it was just closing the bar, which effectively closed it as a venue.
I and many others pointed out at the time that as large chunks of the Town Centre is to be levelled by developers for a new Shopping district and all this was to happen almost to the steps of the Square itself, that the real reason the venue was being closed was because they knew the lease was going to be pulled early.

This is what seems to be happening, the Youth Service will have to re-locate and everything they told us in the public meeting in the Civic Centre was a bunch of lies.

This nationally renowned venue will be levelled for shops and no replacement set to appear for years if ever. This was a cultural catalyst in the Eighties for Harlow bands and has continued to be a safe environment for young people to socially network and watch great live music up until it’s closure.

Now there is nothing.

We lose our only venue and yet the Odeon Cinema building stands empty. Anywhere else some entrepreneur would have opened that up and turned it into a music venue

Meanwhile, the Playhouse is always vulnerable to budget cuts, undermined by councillors too feeble to argue the case for its closure yet retched enough to talk of cutting it, which if they do, will mean it will only be able to put on shows of ever declining quality. Eventually everyone will agree that it isn’t worth the life support system and cut the final funding. Sound harsh? Remember it was closed before and stood empty for a year.

I wouldn’t mind it so much if we had far too many theatres and music venues in Harlow and a venue and theatre folded. But we only had one of each and now there is just the Playhouse.

Welcome to the Brave new world of modern Harlow, you will be mindless consumers even if you don’t want be. For the people that control your lives in this town know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

1965

It may also be uncomfortable for you to know that I was always contemplating murder but I was, is that so unusual for someone my age?

My imagination was full of killing and maiming by gun and explosions day in day out, and no-one stood a chance. Weapons technology far in advance of my opponents would be turned onto these hapless victims and so, for example, my Native American Indians toys had to endure strike after strike by the screaming banshee of the German Stukka Dive bomber.

I had grasped, so early on, the real truth of the American Dream that weapons superiority made even genocide a breeze. They didn’t win over the Native American with ideas or the promise of a fundamental democracy that was the right of human kind, no, they just shot and cannoned them all. They didn’t need a Stukka Dive Bomber, but if they had had one, they would have used it.

You know they would.

Modern warfare for the rich nations of the world had reduced killing to an abstract, where tracking and slaughtering large numbers of people was like playing a video game and evoked feelings no more disturbing than playing with a toy. George Bush Junior and his pals recognised that only the press and public was left to have the potential to understand the pain of the slaughtered innocents.
So, he imbedded the journalists with his troops and fed them Mcfacts and logistics and turned the illegal invasion of Iraq into an abstract by saying it was a War on Terror. Now there were enemies everywhere and if the coalition of the willing killed them in scores, then they must be guilty.

We were left to feel nothing but a love for our toys.