Nearly two weeks have passed since the General Election result. I haven’t been able to think of much else since. ‘Gutted’ is a word I heard a lot in the first few days, describing how many of my close friends and family members felt when the first exit poll was announced at 10pm on May 7th.
Psychotherapist Phillipa Perry’s headline in her recent Guardian article: Traumatised by the election result? caught my eye in the aftermath and her introduction perfectly summed up my own feelings:
‘ It felt like a punch in the stomach when I saw the exit polls. It was a shock. I woke up at about 6am, looked at Twitter and couldn’t stop crying. I had allowed myself to get hopeful and these were tears of disappointment. ‘
Hopeful is the key word here. I too had been excited and optimistic, hoping for a period of respite for my friends working in education and the public sector – respite from increased hours and responsibilities amidst pay freezes, ever increasing erosion of their basic working rights, being denied their entitlement to pensions at a time they expected, and so on. I feel angry on their behalf, as well as concerned for the most vulnerable people in this country who will continue to bear the brunt of another five years of austerity measures.
There has been a lot of rallying round on social media this past week – calls to keep spirits up, to turn despair into hope and to channel anger effectively. Malcolm X, whose words of wisdom I frequently find myself quoting, said this:
‘Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.’
I’ve been reminded of the song ‘Bread and Roses’ recently, partly through seeing a call for protest songs on Twitter but also through hearing it again for the first time in many years in the film, ‘Pride.’ It was one of those goosebumps moments (you can listen to it here from 1.05 onwards…)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNQs6gSOkeU
The political statement around Bread and Roses originated from a speech given by American feminist, socialist and labour union leader, Rose Schneiderman at the start of the twentieth century.
A line in her speech, ‘the worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too‘ inspired the title of the poem Bread and Roses by James Oppenheim. The poem was subsequently set to music and although it commemorates a long forgotten episode in American history, the song has become a kind of anthem, especially for the rights of working women, not just in America, but also world wide. Certainly, it was a popular song choice of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp.
Being reminded of the song inspired me to make a new piece of work. And so, on the second weekend since the election results came in, I dusted myself down and made a creative response to my feelings about the Tories governing for another five years. The image above represents the start of a new online visual project. I’ve written a brief synopsis of what the work means to me in the latest section on my website. If you’re interested, you can read more about my own Bread and Roses here:
http://www.katemurdochartist.com/latest.html
