How much longer can the people of Scotland tolerate things being done to us and not by us?
The problem we face in Caithness is that those who make the most noise about wind farms are a mixture of pro-nuclear, property-owning individuals, many of whom have retired here for the “good life”, who are anti-independence and anti-renewables in general. The real-politic of the unjust corporate energy developments gets lost in the babble of reactive, semi-articulated negativity, on-line chat room conspiracies and rage chambers which lashes out at everything and focuses on nothing. These voices, in which prejudice survives all evidence, care little about cultural provision or a falling population and all that means for social services. What Caithness needs in the future is the opposite of what is happening at present.
Our culture is being shut down and our environment is being ripped up. Our MP has a constituency the size of a European country; our Lib Dem MP is an apologist for the establishment; and our councillors are told nothing and if and when they are do nothing about it. Inverness will have her Castle and Caithness will have her pylons.
On the Ulbster Stone, in the soon-to-be-closing North Coast Visitors Centre, there is a brilliant carving of a mysterious beast. This creature is common to many Pictish stones throughout the North of Scotland and obviously represented something vital and shared by all the people of the time. It represents something vital to us now and it is the perennial, ever-restless sense of justice without which all human society is sterile. The Pictish beast faces down the on-going injustice where the powerful and the rich are protected but not bound by law, the same law that binds the powerless and poor but does not protect them. That injustice is what will be pulsing down the pylon-hung cables from Spittal, through Beauly to Denny. We need to make better connections.