They've Taken My Life

By Richard Lung

I’m treated as if I was a bloody animal, or something. Never done anything, in my life. I might as well be dead. There’s no freedom. Where is my bloody [? life]?
[You're in a care home.]
I don’t need to be in a care home. I’m a very capable person. I sometimes think I’d be better off dead.
I do love you. I can’t work it out. I’m worried about it. You don’t know what’s going on. I love you, but I don’t know what’s happening to my life. I don’t know what I’ve done.
[The council put you in a care home.]
Oh, I’m in it? I thought I was in a golf club. They’re all sitting about as free as [? bods] I just can’t work it out, because I’m a nobody. It’s mystifying. I’m unsettled and unhappy and suicidal.
Don’t worry, sweet-heart. I’ll always love you, with all my heart. You’re the reason I want to live.
It makes me think I’ve done a wrong doing. I’m so heart-broken. It sounds as if we’re being used. -- As if we are puppets. I feel as if I want to die. It’s absolutely terrible. Nobody knows... I haven’t got a proper life. It isn’t right, and it’s hard to live with. I can’t settle down. – Even sitting down. I’m bored. I’ve nobody to talk to, of home. Isn’t it silly?
And I want to be with my son. Why not? He’s not going to hurt me? I love my son. I love him best in all the world. I think it’s like a foreign country, where you're locked up, and can’t get away. I’m sat in here, for hours. I’ve no one to talk to. I’m very worried about it.
This country neglects the elderly. (I want you back home.)
That’s my house. I bought it and saved, all my life, for it. You’ve told me how it stands. I know. I don’t want you to get hot under the collar about it. Nobody wants to help. They're the boss. I love you with all my heart, and I worry about you, because I love you so much. It’s wrong, isn’t it?
Don’t try to anticipate...
I’ll keep it to myself, and my son, who I love with all my heart, and I’m sorry for all this trouble. But I never caused it. I just do the best I can.
Same here.
You are my best loved person. My heart is beating. I want to be there, and touch you. And be together, all we want. That’s all I’m asking for. I want to be with my son. I don’t care about possessions. And I got that little house, so me and you could be together. And all I get is trouble. And we aren’t causing any trouble. It’s just selfish.
Don’t meet trouble half-way. [Ella is too right, tho. Ed.]
I just want to be with my son. I want, most of all, to be with my son. All my life, I’ve waited for this time to be together. I don’t want money or treasures. I just want to be living with my son. I have nothing.
It’s all a puzzle, and a fraud, I think. And all this other stuff is just a twist. -- Wanting this, and wanting that, and sharing up other peoples work. It’s fraud.
I love you, darling. I love you with all my heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Lung
• Release date: Jul 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005886912

Richard Lung

My later years acknowledge the decisive benefit of the internet and the web in allowing me the possibility of publication, therefore giving the incentive to learn subjects to write about them.While, from my youth, I acknowledge the intellectual debt that I owed a social science degree, while coming to radically disagree, even as a student, with its out-look and aims.Whereas from middle age, I acknowledge how much I owed to the friendship of Dorothy Cowlin, largely the subject of my e-book, Dates and Dorothy. This is the second in a series of five books of my collected verse. Her letters to me, and my comments came out, in: Echoes of a Friend.....Authors have played a big part in my life.Years ago, two women independently asked me: Richard, don't you ever read anything but serious books?But Dorothy was an author who influenced me personally, as well as from the written page. And that makes all the difference.I was the author of the Democracy Science website since 1999. This combined scientific research with democratic reform. It is now mainly used as an archive. Since 2014, I have written e-books.I have only become a book author myself, on retiring age, starting at stopping time!2014, slightly modified 2022.

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Table of Contents

They've Taken My Life

Preface:

to the conscience of a free society

August

September

October

November

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They've Taken My Life

Preface:

to the conscience of a free society

I am conscious of my own tiredness, and the inadequacy of these notes.

The state is exploiting family life. It was meant to defend families against raiders and robbers. But the cure has become something of the disease.

Tradition left the family as the default carer for its members. (Honor your father and your mother.) This is what our famiy believed was still the case. Now this state has made itself the default controler of family life. For instance, if you don’t have something called a lasting power of attorney, on the pretext of health-care, officials are liable to abduct helpless or vulnerable family members, into institutions, robbing them of the love of family and friends; robbing them of their savings, to pay for it, and robbing them of their full life-spans.

If an adult child has a general power of attorney, given by a parent, that power is not actually general. It just covers family finances, not health-care. You have to have a lasting power of attorney, as well, for the latter.

Even then, that agent of the state, the social worker may attempt to over-ride the general power of attorney, with a state guardianship. This confiscates family finances. – To the tune, of some £2 billion, when, some years ago, families were complaining they were getting no interest, on these holdings.

Social care, in an allegedly liberal democracy, takes on features of totalitarian socialism. – Parasites, predators, and pirates are epithets that come to mind. Their patron saints might be the robber barons. Whereas state sponsored Sir Francis Drake plundered the plunderous Spaniards, rather than his own people.

As GK Chesterton would say, rather than swords, the new rulers fight with pieces of paper. – Mountains of dysfunctional dishonest disregarding documents. – That spell the ruination of a good and useful nation.

Criminal suspects are protected by criminal law, that due process, to ensure the truth is known, by all, beyond reasonable doubt.

Ordinary civilians are exposed to the chances of civil law. Instead of objective proof of the truth, subjective assessments of a balance of probabilities, as to the truth, is ordained. This, in practise, means that the state version of events, given by professionals (those proud to make money out of a broken system) is taken as a matter of course.

Traditional society consists of extended families, which are able to support their members, most of the time. A so-called modern industrial society, like Britain, has split-up extended families, into the so-called nuclear family, no more than parents and children, with little or no roles for other relatives.

Government has actively encouraged this trend, by extending state supervision, right down to nursery level. Social services have gone to extremes of state control, with an inhuman policy of forced adoption.

The government is supposed to be supporting independence, at home, for the elderly. But such cases, as have escaped to public attention, show that a wicked law (so-called by one of its victims, my mother, Mrs Ella Lung) of deprivation of liberties, is bitterly contested.

Family is a life-time of caring relationships, that makes for the affection, no institution can give. The state should be promoting the former, not the latter. Family love, not state power, is the foundation of society.

(Contractual marriage, instead of burning ones boats or common-law lack of arrangements, might better defend the family, against state encroachments.) Love is also defense against, and best remedy for, addiction.

The corrupting power, given to social services, is destabilising society, with fear and hatred of state control. This weakens the power of love, and its benefits, in resisting all kinds of addiction, that may become pathological or destructive of character and responsibility. Out-right Prohibition laws may put the state under the control of criminal behavior, making refugees of peaceful citizens, along with the cancer of trafficking.

Any condemnation, here, is not intended to punish the guilty. They, whoever they are, will be lucky, if their consciences awake to the grievous wrongs being committed, and if they manage to atone for them. Rather, the intention is to wake the conscience of a free society.

The very word, wake, reminds of the so-called woke consciousness, which has become a by-word for repressive political correctness. On the contrary, the intention is to counter Draconian suppression, by a secret state, that is the epitome of an Inquisition, digging its heels in, against free and open discussion by a knowledge-based society.

An unregenerate government pretends to be liberal and democratic. It is a career polity of safe seats. This consists of a parliament of 650 incumbents, most of them with jobs for life. A member of the public is only allowed to approach one of them, who is a glorified apolitical sorter of local problems. These should be settled by local democracy, which is moribund.

Thus, the first chamber of government is minimally democratic. The second chamber is not formally democratic, at all, packed with pensioned-off political colleagues, instead of a comprehensive occupational franchise of specialist knowledge. (I have discussed a free system of electoral reform and democracy, in many publications.)

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August

Table of Contents

11 August

visit

(Ella did nearly all the talking. It’s not my policy to take notes, with minimal exceptions:) I just listen and forget. I believe in freedom (doing what you want to do).

Who doesn’t? Everybody does.

I’m trying to get you home.

You haven’t got the power. You can’t do anything. They can keep it; it kills them, in the end. Let them.…

(Ella is wreathed in smiles – her lovely smile, full of unselfish love:) I don’t want you to do anything for me. I just want to love you, as you are.

You’re wonderful, Mum.

No, I’m just your Mum.

They don’t allow me, in the bed-room, with you.

Oh, forget about it!

(The manager appeared, watching us from a doorway. She soon disappears, when she saw Ellas warmth of reassurance:) It doesn’t matter. It’s not worth bothering about. It’s nothing. Who cares? It’s no good complaining, it only makes them worse. They’ll even do the opposite to what you want, for devilment.

[Denied privacy, and kept under observation, in a forced collective. But Ella has the good sense to talk me out of controversy.]

I love you, as long as I live.

And I love you as long as I live (and even after).

No matter where you are, you will always be in my heart.

(Of some scrollwork, above the window:) That spells my name. [It’s not really for me, it’s just a brand name for the room.] [Ella is hooking her name to the still strange room. I might invent some mnemonics for mother.]

(Ella keeps asking:) Where are you?… At number (of house)?

Yes… I’ve done nothing for you.

Your love is everything to me.

(Ella gave a clear concise account of the successive farms, she was at, since birth. Paraphrasing:) I was born, in a little village, on the moors.

Did it have a shepherds cottage, on the moors?

You do have some romantic ideas. No, why should it have?

You pointed out the workmens cottage, on the hill.

What’s that got to do with where I was born?

Then we moved to the guest-house, in the open fields, on a slope. Then we moved to Wood farm. We were there for eight years. – a quarter of an hour to school. It was warm, and you go without a coat, only to be soaked by a shower, on the way back, and get really poorly. Then we went to River farm. That was two to three miles to school.

You started in shops, after that.

I don’t want to know about that…

[To the house] I remember coming across the fields [by the adjacent street, she names correctly, instead of linking her abode to the rural area of her last farm].

(Outside the care home window) I don’t like the view; all them bushes. They’re blowing like mad. By! It is cold. – bitter.

You will feel the drafts from the wind.

It’s not like summer. You couldn’t call it warm, for summer. – British weather.

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12 August

[How are you doing?]

Same as I always do. – No different. It never changes.

(I’ve been doing some pruning.)

It’s miserable cold, here. I’m in-side, up-stairs. There’s no heat on, and it’s cold as it can be. Cold as sitting outside.… Never mind, -- gone thru it all. Finished. Full stop.…

I think about you…

[In reponse to some forgotten remark of mine:] One way of looking at it… Aye, funny lad. Whose little lad are you?

I’ll always be your little lad.

I think it’s November, not August. – Terrible cold; no heating in here. I’m absolutely nithered, and there’s nowt you can do about it. I mean, if you told ‘em, they wouldn’t do owt about it. If you knew it was going to be like this, I’d emigrated. – If I’d known it was going to be like this, all my born days, [I've never known anything like it]...

We have long winters in Britain. – Cold here, no heat. It is a rum climate. I’m just cold, absolutely frozen. I’m wondering where to go, see if it’s warmer. I’m against the wall, over the carpet. [Carpeted side of the room.]

[I picked some goose-berries, from the garden.]

I don’t know why I’m here. I wish I’d never come up here. I hate it. It spoils my life, listening to it.… My little sweet-heart, I’d rather talk to you. – Don’t want to talk about them.…

A few are in here, keeping it a bit warmer, and when they go out, it doesn’t half make a difference.

[Your past life,] it was my life.

It was my life, an’ all.

I can’t help that.

I can’t, either