Who Cares?
Many years of Conservative
government have worn me out. News items which would erstwhile have provoked
paroxysms of righteous indignation are met now by indifference. After all, it
is just what the people wanted. And it would just reinforce my feeling that the
people are a bunch of sheep – happy to be taken to the charnel house. Just so
long as there was somebody worse off, somebody that could be demonized as the
cause of all their ills. Funnily enough the ones that caused the problem and weather
the harsh winds of fiscal austerity better than most, escape this opprobrium.
The key is to be in a worse situation. A few examples:
Care homes and some hospitals.
Cases of abuse of patients in care homes – the old, the infirm, the
disadvantaged, the young, the unprotected at the mercy of their carers – are reported
almost daily. The covert films are heart rending. How does this happen? Because
ill-trained people are paid minimum wages by businesses seeking profit and it
is easy for them to see their charges (the cause of their troubles) as
sub-human and to a useful outlet for their frustrations. The employees are given
no reason to respect their position and their work and so they don’t. The lack
of respect must mean lack of value attributed to the patients.
Those on welfare. We are deluged
with imagery of the feckless unemployed – the strivers or skivers, the people
with their blinds drawn when you go to work, the plain lazy (ideally fat,
cigarette smoking, with a load if fat brats, sloping around the house all day
in their housecoats and slippers). The mantra easily goes – cut benefits, force
them to work, or let them starve. No mention that jobseekers allowance is a
small part of the welfare bill – most of it goes to pensions (and we cannot
touch those because they are the Conservatives voting base), income support (to
people who do work but are not paid enough to make a living – effectively the
state subsidizing miserable capitalists, but that is another story), and
disability allowances. Then there is the (probable) myth of thousands of
unfilled menial jobs – promulgating the image that the unemployed are work-shy.
How many of them are ‘real’ jobs? How many are filled but nobody told the job
shops? How many of the are just permanent ‘fishing’ expeditions for positions
which pay so badly or are just so awful that nobody stays in them very long?
But we, the sheep, lap this stuff up - if we have to suffer working long hours
for a wage which buys less and less every year, why shouldn’t everybody suffer
along with us (but a little worse because we are better than them)?
Immigrants – and this is the
straw that broke my back – especially illegal ones. Oh that just brings out the
very worst in us. Look at the story from British Columbia last week where a
film crew from a profit-driven TV channel was allowed to follow a troop of
Border Services people on a raid to a building site to seek a suspected
criminal illegal immigrant (the worst of the worst, just to justify the raid to
and spice up the episode).With the fulsome approval of the Rt Hon Vic Toews
(Eric Pickles of Canada – a Neanderthal with no evident intelligence and a thoroughly
mean disposition). In the end they netted a bunch of sorry people in a variety
of bad situations who now have their stories plastered over the TV show for the
delectation of who exactly? Some of these people were seeking refugee status
and trying to get a few extra dollars to feed their family, some were fleeing
who knows what in their homeland, and some were chancers in between seasonal
employment who found it more convenient to stay in Canada rather than return
home for a few months. But all were tarred with the same brush – illegals stealing
jobs from Canadians. As such they had no rights in the eyes for the majority of
people commenting on the story online. Why shouldn’t the BS get a bit of
publicity for the job they do? Show the world that Canada is not a soft touch anymore?
See how well your tax dollars are spent?
The illegals are barely accorded human status – they have no privacy, no right
to a fair hearing, so what if somebody makes a buck from their misery. I would
comment that many of these posters would count themselves as Christians but
then I would be falling onto a trap of my own making.
The European Union can require
Cyprus to steal 10% of the money in personal savings accounts in order to
secure a bail out of their banks. How can this be right, how can it be accepted
as a reasonable course of action, how far have we sunk as a civilized people?
How can any sane and rational person not rail against the sainted bloated
plutocrat banker rather than the poor unfortunate struggling to make ends meet?
The riots of summer 2011 are really not so hard to understand, and it is not so
hard to foresee them being repeated.
The point of all this is the
small difference I see between what I am hearing now and what we heard in the
1930’s, in the sugar plantations, in apartheid South Africa, in the segregated Deep
South of the USA. The current economic and political situation is bringing out
the worst in us, not all of us, but it is getting harder and harder to be
ashamed of what we are. A primal scream is not far away.
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