Still seeking a way out -- to a better life
● When Tim Jenkin was locked up in Pretoria prison he wasn’t locked down. He had the keys to the jail doors and was relatively free to roam the prison — well, when the guards weren’t looking.
But even before he had made the wooden keys he managed to escape the boredom and loneliness by devoting 15 hours a day to thinking of how to break out. “Keeping busy prevented me from going mad,” he says.
Jenkin is keeping busy again during the novel coronavirus lockdown and he is still thinking of ways to escape — not from the lockdown itself (although he is frustrated at having his freedoms taken away), but the monetary system.
Jenkin has spent the last month focusing on the Community Exchange System (CES) — an alternative way of trading that he believes provides the answer to breaking free from the chains of money. The exchange system is a web service that helps communities set up and manage exchange and trade in their areas without using money.
“We have seen a massive spike in applications to join the exchange,” Jenkin says, adding that CES groups that have been dormant in SA and Europe have suddenly come alive again.
“As millions of people around the world lose their jobs and economies go belly up, people are looking for alternative ways of doing things. This happened in [the financial crisis of] 2008. For years we’ve been saying the Community Exchange System will be a lifeboat when the monetary system collapses. It seems that has finally come true.”
According to Jenkin, the current economic system won’t save the world and as more and more people become jobless we need to start looking after ourselves; planting vegetable gardens and exchanging supplies.
“We can’t sit around and expect our government or some big philanthropist or some charity to come and rescue us, we have to take our survival into our own hands and start doing things for ourselves. We don’t know how it’s going to unfold but we need to recognise that the next few years are going to be very tough so we need to focus on a plan.”
Jenkin says the wooden keys he made in prison and that he used to gain his freedom 40 years ago are very symbolic because they are low-tech, and the world needs to find low-tech ways of escaping from the money system.
“We don’t need more computers and more technology that will ensure people are manipulated, followed and monitored all the time,” he says.
Jenkin believes SA’s lockdown rules have been too severe and says that within people’s own lockdown they can create their freedom — and, in fact, it’s their duty to break irrational rules.
“I walk to the shops and take the longest possible route to get a bit of exercise,” he says.
When he’s not focused on the CES, he’s working on his own veggie garden, running laps around the complex where he lives “and doing things that I had always pretended I never had time to do, like de-cluttering the junk from my home”.
“The strange thing is that although we are supposed to be self-isolating in the complex there has never been such a sense of community as there is now. I’m getting to know the neighbours and there’s a feeling that we are in this thing together. You can see it on the internet as well. There’s so much chatter going on, people are sending memes and YouTube videos to each other and this peculiar sense of community is growing.”
According to Jenkin, the pandemic has been a huge wakeup call for people to think about where our society is going.
“We have all noticed that it’s wonderful to walk in the streets and not worry about cars knocking you over. Why can’t we keep it like this? Why do we have to go back to what there was before?” he asks.
“We want something better; and this is our chance to escape the money system and build a cleaner, fresher and more friendly world.”