If you are of voting age in the UK (18 years or older), the chances are that you will be able to remember the 2011 Riots, which are sometimes referred to as the London Riots too.

During a period of 5 days and nights that August, many people took to the streets in different places and engaged in civil unrest.

You didn’t have to be there or in the middle of a riot, or anywhere near a shop being looted or burned to the ground, to be shocked, concerned or frightened by what you could see was going on.

It doesn’t seem normal or rational for people to behave this way. But we all need to understand that when fear and desperation leads beyond frustration to anger, and people no longer believe they have anything else to lose, there is no logic, no form of words and no out-of-the-moment promise that can be made to them, that will make the desire they have to act irrationally or without care, go away.

If people in the area you live begin to engage in any form of civil unrest, or you yourself feel desperate enough to join any group of people which has taken to the streets, please think about the point that we have all already collectively reached, and what we can all do together constructively without damaging anything or the relationships that we have with anyone, who or that can become part of the new system we can build from what we must now replace.

You may see policemen, paramedics, firefighters, soldiers and public sector representatives as representatives of the system. But they are real people behind their badges or uniform. People just the same as you and I.

We do not need to destroy anything or hurt anyone else to achieve change and to create a new system. We only have to withdraw our collective consent from the one that we must replace.

Nobody has to continue working for the existing system. But it will help us all if those who have public responsibility continue to fulfil the genuine purposes of their roles, and help and protect all others, whilst sense begins to be made of what we all need to do to ensure that above everything, each and every one of us is safe, has shelter and the things we need, and has access to enough of the basic essentials with the priority always given to basic foods.

There is no part of the system we have today or the governance framework that allows it to function and dictate every part of our life, that has been left untouched by somebody somewhere changing it to further or to protect their own interests in some way.

Whether it has been local public service provision, local interpretation of planning law, the way non-government organisations are run, the rules that govern imports, exports and supply chains, or how public policy is designed by civil servants in Westminster, EVERYTHING at EVERY LEVEL has been built to serve the mechanics of a system that is Top-Down.

If you are anywhere in this hierarchy or pyramid at a level which is below the top, it has only worked for you by giving you things you have been led to believe you need, but which you actually want that are outside of yourself.

The price will have been that to some degree or another, you will have forgotten something or perhaps everything about real life, real values and the fundamental building blocks of who you really are.

How we interact with others and with everything in the world outside of us, is a mirror image of the person inside us at that very moment. Its who we believe we really are at that time.

If you pause and take that in, you may begin to see the part that everyone has played in allowing the world to become the place that it is today.

However, rather than dwelling on the things you’ve said to others, or the things you have or haven’t done, the way to put that behind you and play a role in shaping a world that is fair, balanced and works in the best interests of everyone, is to put the value back into everything in your life, and make everything that feeds into your life experience have meaning. This is not only your first building block of a new life for you, it’s the very first step towards the creation of the new world around us, beginning by changing the way we think about everything around us. Its how the old world will be replaced.

YOU ARE THE GRASSROOTS – no matter who you are, where you come from, or what you have or haven’t already done.

Before anything else, it is you, the Grassroots that must come together as neighbourhoods and then as communities. We can then work together to rediscover, reinvent and reinterpret localised systems that work for and on behalf of everybody. Always prioritizing peoples needs before anything else, and not what money or profit can be accumulated, or what glory, status, power or influence can be attained.

Top-Down is over. It’s all about Grassroots-Up. And it’s the people who are the GRASSROOTS who must always come first.

One of the hardest realities to get our heads around is that much of the way we behave with others and interact with the outside world is based on nothing more than belief.

Furthermore, we too often then fail to recognise that the beliefs that we have – which govern our behaviour for the future, are actually based on experiences that we have had in the past.

The past is quite literally governing how we will interact with our future.

We are allowing rules that we either created for ourselves, or that society created for us, to dictate what happens in circumstances and situations where those rules are no longer fit for purpose, or don’t serve any of our interests very well at all.

Yes, it can be quite a strange moment when we realise that we are living in the past. But what many of us don’t understand beyond this, is that our acceptance of this part of our reality – without question, means that we also don’t question change or the behaviour of others, when that change or behaviour can be quickly labelled with ‘That’s the way things are supposed to be’. ‘That’s just how it is’, or ‘That’s just the way that things have always been done’.

To be quite fair, it will feel to many of us that the system we have or the governance structure around us has been a good one.

It has allowed the world around us to keeping turning. It has kept everything outside of our own bubbles working, so that everything we want is ready and waiting wherever it should be. It has made us believe that life is easy and can only get easier, without us even questioning what the real cost of this automatic surrender of our trust would be.

But we don’t really think about what’s going on around us. Because this is the way that things have been done for so long.

We trust that the people we elect are in office to represent us.

We trust that big business always put the needs and interests of their customers first.

We trust that the public sector works and operates to make life for the public better.

We trust that the establishment together, will always do right for all of us.

Yet as an increasing number of us are now realising, the time when any of these beliefs were created, was a long way back in the past.

We are beginning to understand and accept that placing our trust in the establishment was at best a mistake. At worst, it is being proven completely wrong.

The ‘system’ no longer works for the people. But because of our collective belief and deference to the way we believe things should work – even when they clearly aren’t, we fail to realise that the power everyone within the establishment has isn’t theirs because of the money, status, position that they ‘have’ or because they are special in some way.

It is because we have given them that power. And we have forgotten that power is ours, and we have every right to take it back.

Getting your head around the reality of where power really lies is hard enough. What becomes even more challenging is taking the next step to understand and to accept that all the tools that the establishment have been using to make life so easy for us, only work because we believe everything that we are being verbally or experientially told.

We are collectively blind to the fact that any or every part of the system would stop working immediately the very moment that we stopped believing what we believe about it. And that at the very moment we did so, we would be withdrawing from the establishment, what is our assumed consent.

There is a very good reason to make the effort to try and making sense of how the governance or ruling frameworks of the world that we know around us really work.

That reason is the system as we know it has not been run or managed in our best interests for a very long time.

The cumulative effect of decision after decision being made to benefit the specific interests of those within the establishment has been catalysed by the government response to recent events and the whole system is now in the process of a massive collapse.

The challenge presented to us all by what is happening around us right now, is that you quite literally have to see it, to believe it.

And if you still believe that the ‘system’ you have spent your life believing in will always work for you, even when it becomes very clear that it doesn’t, it hasn’t and it won’t, then you will not be able to see the damage that it is and has been doing when the time comes for us all to do something. The people and people just like them who we have all believed to be ‘in charge’, will simply be able to continue to count on your vote.

If you have read this far and have concluded that I am talking bollocks, I’d like to thank you for doing so and sincerely wish you all the best.

However, if you can see any of the truth in what I am saying, or even suspect that at least some of it could be right, please do keep reading as we are all on a journey that can no longer be avoided.

What happens next, is all about us realising that the power to do everything that needs to be done is in the hands of each and every one of us.

The power for creating a much better future isn’t based on the past and won’t simply appear in the future. Its all about what we think, decide and do right here in the moment or in the ‘now’.

The throw away culture has been sold to us as making life our lives easier. Easier on our time and easier on what we can afford.

We have been paying little more than lip service to recycling for far too long.

The emphasis has been on what has been politically expedient for the political classes. That has been for us only to concentrate only on rubbish and changes that are perceived as being easy for everyone to do, of having no real effect, and of having no cost in terms of money or on what we perceive to be our quality of life.  

Before they were emboldened by our willing response to their unnecessary Covid Measures, this was the only way that spinless politicians could be sure that anu kind of open green policy would not cost them votes.

But the throw away culture has come at a very high price. It has been built on the unnecessary use of resources that cannot be replaced. It has damaged the environment through the unnecessary processes of production, transport and the level of waste disposal necessary to cover the amount of discarded goods that were deliberately designed so that they would quickly have to be replaced.

We have unlearned the value of making the very best of everything that we already have or could even share or borrow. Meanwhile, we have been drip fed from every direction that the idea that we can have absolutely everything that we want – just as long as we can afford the £price.

Sucked in – as we have been – by the reality that we now qualify everyone and everything by what it looks like to us and to others, and what it tells everyone else about who we are or what we can afford, we have willingly taken every step possible to walk away from who we really are and leave the values that really help us all far behind.

The world around us reflects who we are inside. We have all played a part in what is happening. So, for us to accept that change and a different way of doing things in the world outside of us is now necessary, we must all embrace what that change really means for us within our minds.

Whilst I have already touched on the revival of Make do and Mend, it cannot be understated just how much we can all help ourselves as this period of crisis deepens, by stepping away from the reliance we have, that everything we need, will come to us ‘new’.

It won’t. Easy everything is at its end.

Yes, the supply of new goods will appear to continue for a time, with that supply coughing and spluttering in terms of those things that remain available. But many other items – particularly those which are items we want, rather than what we need, or that come to us from great distances across the world – will simply disappear from our lives for good.

One way or another – affecting those most who find affordability the main issue first, followed by all those who believe they have plenty of money now and find that it quickly becomes less and less until what they ‘have’ has no value at all – ‘new’ simply isn’t going to be the ‘go to’ option anymore.

It’s all going to be about what we can reuse, how we can reuse it. What we can repair and how we can repair it. What we can recycle and how we can reuse goods that cannot be used again for their original purpose, and then repurpose them in the best way possible – to benefit ourselves and to benefit us ALL.

Think smart. Think about the skills that you really have already or those that you could easily learn. Think about a very practical world where everything revolves around life, living and the community, where people and not money are the centre of everything, rather than what we only appear to have going on around us right now.

If you have an interest or talent in arts and crafts, or even feel quite proficient at DIY, the chances are that you can put that interest or ability to good work. First to help yourself, but also to help others around your neighbourhood and community too.