Thread by @simonmaginn

I'm being informed our media are never going to admit to what they did, and so there's no point doing what I'm doing with #ItWasAScam.
I’m ‘wasting my time.’
Some thoughts on that.

Whilst there’s much obvious truth to the first part of it - our media can never and will never admit to lying to us for seven years, how could they possibly? - I would take issue with the second part (‘wasting my time’).

There exist no absolute meanings in life. We must, each of us, find our own meanings. We *create* meanings, we discover them, we find them, we invent them. Meaning is what is meaningful *to us*.

I was leafletting outside Labour Conference the year before last, and an older woman approached me. She told me she was a Jewish Labour delegate, a lifelong Labour activist, who had just that morning had her Conference pass disabled.

She had been accused of antisemitism. ‘How can they say that?’ she said, and her startlingly beautiful eyes filled up. Mine did too, and there was a clumsy attempt at a social-distancing-breaking hug.

I think of her when some lying Guardian jackass is performing on PoliticsLive, or a cynical BBC hack is repeating their litany of hate.

I think of how her eyes filled up, how hurt she was, how simply *cruel* this whole dismal circus is and has always been.

I will never let them get away with it, with their cruelty and their hate.
I will never accept it, and I will never let it go.

People, good, decent people, people like that Jewish woman, have been treated in the most appallingly hurtful way, and it will always be meaningful to me to fight it, to expose it, to condemn it.

So I don’t feel I’m ‘wasting my time’. My time spent fighting their smears will always be time spent 'meaningfully', as far as I’m concerned.

Yes, we won’t change our corrupt and hateful media and politics.
Yes, the hate and the smearing will go on, and our voices will count for little enough compared to theirs.
But we all fight our own wars, and the meaning is in the fighting.

We fight and we continue to fight because, simply, it is the right thing to do. Doing what is right is meaningful.
Telling the truth is meaningful. Demanding justice is meaningful.

And doing what is meaningful is never ‘time wasted’.