FOR people who have spent their lives imagining a better world, these past few weeks have been grim.

In Syria the bodies pile up higher and higher, while Iraq has just suffered its deadliest attack since 2003, with over 250 people blown to pieces.

In Nice, the streets have run red with blood, leaving Marine Le Pen salivating at this renewed opportunity to fan the flames of xenophobic rage.

In England, the right-wing drumbeat has grown louder by the day, as the forces of racist reaction celebrate their Brexit triumph. Theresa May has just assembled the most right wing cabinet since the hey-day of Thatcherism, complete with Boris Johnson appointed to be, heaven help us, the UK’s interface with the world. And on the opposition benches, the Blairite tendency has fired the first bullets in a brutal political civil war, virtually guaranteeing Tory rule at Westminster for at least another decade.

In Turkey, the far-right egomaniac Erdogan is threatening to carry out mass executions as he moves to replace the secularism of the Turkish state with a fundamentalist regime.

And on the other side of the Atlantic, the prospect beckons of President Trump, who makes Ronald Reagan look like a cuddly teddy bear. As the world goes up in flames, the feeling of powerlessness is overwhelming, and I find myself thinking that this is not a world I want to live in.

It has never been more tempting to pack up the placards, close down the social media accounts, curl up under a duvet and surf the multitude of TV channels out there that feed us fantasy rather than reality. Wake me up when it’s all over…

That’s one of the problems politics has always had. It draws people in. It opens a door to thoughts, ideas, and knowledge that can liberate you from humdrum life.

But it also brings the plight of the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Kurds, the Somalis, the Iraqis, the Afghans, the citizens of Nice, the young black people shot by American police officers, the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram… and plants them on your doorstep, filling your head until it bursts.

It feels like too much because it is too much.

But there are kernels of hope out there. There are people working away in their own backyards to shift the balance in favour of a more cooperative, fairer world.

Like in Lochaber and Laggan, for instance. Without much fanfare, Scotland could be about to see the biggest community land buyout in its history.

The East Lochaber and Laggan Community Trust was formed to buy the 125,000 acre Rio Tinto Alcan Estate, which includes the land that surrounds the famous aluminium smelter.

The existence of the smelter operation, which relies on hydro-electric power drawn from schemes such as Laggan and Treig, as well as the massive Blackwater Dam at Kinlochleven, is down to the hard labour of thousands of navvies.

The brutality of their lives in a merciless environment was brought to life by Patrick McGill in his classic autobiographical novel Children of the Dead End. The local graveyard is studded with the unmarked graves of unknown casualties; some were killed at work, while others froze to death on the Devil’s Staircase as they made their way back to Kinlochleven in white-out conditions after seeking solace in the bar of the Kingshouse Hotel.

To this day, the lights are on in Kinlochleven, and beyond, because of millions of pick-axe blows struck into the rock of the intimidating mountains by long-dead men.

In January of this year, Rio Tinto, the global mining giant that now owns the smelter, the estate and the hydro-electric schemes, indicated it was carrying out a “strategic review” of its assets – triggering alarm bells in the community.

But shock has turned into determination to turn adversity into opportunity. The community does not have the industrial expertise to own and run an aluminium smelter. But it can take over this vast and iconic landscape in the heart of the Highlands. It also hopes to collaborate with others to try and secure the future of the smelter and the awesome hydro schemes that power it.

John Hutchison, chair of the not-for-profit trust that aims to buy the massive tract of land is a polite, ebullient man with bushy sideburns who likes to swing his kilt and sing Gaelic songs in his powerful baritone voice.

On the face of it, he’s not the kind of man you would expect to be sitting down to arduous negotiations with the sort of hard-headed types involved in global mining. But he has form.

John was pivotal in the community buyouts of Knoydart and Eigg and is the recently retired Chair of the John Muir Trust, which owns and manages Ben Nevis and a number of other wild mountainous areas in the Highlands. He was a director of Community Land Scotland and a leading figure in the first Scottish Rural parliament. A civil engineer by trade, he is now chair of the West Highland Campus of the University of the Highlands and Islands.

And he is part of a strong team of highly respected local figures, who are well known names across the villages of East Lochaber and Laggan, including Patricia Jordan, Flora McKee, Campbell Slimon, Duncan MacPhee, Ben Thompson and Andrew Baxter.

They have got off to a flying start, inspiring the community around the Rio Tinto Estate to garner enough support to make a buyout feasible. If successful, the 125,000 acres would put the Scottish Government well on its way to its ambitious target of a million acres of community owned land in Scotland.

So, when I ask the question, “Where do you start?”, the answer is provided by a group of community stalwarts from East Lochaber and Laggan, who are trying to bring a bit of power back to local people.

A small group of people with vision and determination can set off a chain of events that can reverberate down through the generations. John Hutchison and the team may well be on course to make history and change at least a little bit of our world for the better.

In an era where greed, violence and destruction are on the rampage it’s heartening to see a glimpse of the power of ordinary people motivated not by money, power or glory, but justice, decency and solidarity.