Whilst I was walking home tonight, past pub after pub half filled with people indulging in the Great British hobby of getting wrecked on a Thursday evening, laughing and grinning their way through the evening, it occurred to me that the easiest thing to do would be to go in and join them. To stop worrying for a while. To stop thinking for a while. To resign myself to apathy, and bury my head in the sand and not think about the country and world around me. After all, it works for other people, so why not me?

Perhaps I'm retarded in some way - I certainly feel like I have Asperger's Syndrome a lot of the time. But I just can't do it. Don't get me wrong, I go out to the pub, I enjoy myself, I live a life. But I just can't bring myself to ignore the wider world around me. I just have to open a newspaper, go online, turn on the TV and I see something else that riles me. Or something that makes me shake my head. Or something that makes me worried about where this country is going and why the increasingly bovine masses fail to see what is happening.

We live in a country fighting two wars against fundamentalists. People are still dying in far off countries, the body bags are still coming home, but the oh so vocal protests that heralded the war have now faded into oblivion - ironically they disappeared at about the same time as the reason for the Iraq War was shown to be based on a sham. Don't get me wrong, I think that if you join the army you have to entertain the possibility that you will go into conflict, and you may not come back from that. But fuck me, couldn't the vast majority of people in this country actually care when the latest kid gets his face blown off by a car bomb in Iraq or murdered by a militant in Afghanistan? Shouldn't that be slightly more of a news story than Strictly Come Dancing?

And what about the economic situation? The economy is royally fucked, and the government is blundering in every way as it tries to help. Yet Brown's nationalising, his clumsy interventions and his idiotic preening are being hailed as a shining examples of what the state can do to help. Why aren't people questioning more, and actually asking where this crisis came from? Because Gordon fucking Brown has just as much responsibility for the meltdown in the financial services sector as those reckless bankers and those careless people who took 125% mortgages.

We live in a society where the cruel murder of a baby is met with point scoring in the House of Commons. We watch mutely as our civil liberties are eroded, placidly accepting the empty rhetoric of a War on Terror that can never be won as it never existed. We let the government come and take our money, to piss away like there is no tomorrow, and we see nothing in return. Our leaders all look the same, and spout the same crass platitudes. There is no progress, just more of the same.

Sometimes I look at this country, and see a broken and muted populace that is content to muddle through, as long as the beer doesn't get too expensive, the TV still shows free form populist shite and there's a KFC at the end of the road. I despair of where this country is going, but cannot understand why the population is stood in front of the Commons, screaming for real change, and screaming for an end to the murky, incompetent consensus ruling this country but offering nothing more than what has gone before.

This is an incoherent, impotent howl of rage from someone who wonders what will happen next and fears the worst. I would love, I would love for people to wake up and start thinking about what is really happening. And then to start protesting it. I would love for people to stop trusting the state that rapes your wallet, that bickers endlessly as people die, that eats away at your freedom at the same time as sending soldiers away to die in unwinnable wars. But tonight, as I look out at this country, I wonder whether it will ever actually happen.

Maybe it is time to turn off my brain, head to the pub, then bury my head in the sand. You know what? If I could, I would. But I can't.

So whilst this endless sorry farrago of political divas and ideological vacuums rules this country through a deceptively bland but actually deeply destructive consensus, there will be one little voice of dissent shouting away here. It may not be a lot, and it may never end up achieving anything. But I'm not going to shut up, and I'm not - as tempting as it may be right here, right now - to give up. It ain't much, but it is what I have to offer.