Decades of hard won assumption

Subject: Decades of hard won assumption 

Part of the reason for starting a blog was to set down the ideas and prejudices of a person born in 1940 who is in some ways struggling to come to terms with the ideas and prejudices of of the world today. How our views have changed, or in my case have remained stubbornly fixed in those formed during the period of my childhood struggle to make sense of the world around.
It's a changing and challenging progression from the days when this small island punched above its weight, when Empire was still mentioned by my teachers as a proud establishment the map of the world coloured red showing the countries where our influence and administrative clout still mattered. It was a powerful story embellishing a do or die effort to hold our civilised views against indigenous savagery.
Today the boot is on the other foot as we seek to uphold our views and our way of life against those very people about who we held such prejudicial views.
When I had the opportunity to travel I used to marvel and feel proud to see the structures, the architecture, the railway lines, the cranes standing at the dockside, the nameplates on the machinery, household names in U.K. engineering, Compton Parkinson, English Electric, GEC, still standing strong in good working order, the ruminants  of Empire still performing the task allocated to them in the days when we set the seal of good workmanship on what we designed and produced.

With this heritage in mind I now listen to people who's lives have been encapsulated behind a computer keyboard assuming a mantra of "rights", decrying not only the concept of Empire, with its administrative order, a legal framework of contractual business as well as the structural framework of democratic responsibility. 

These young people articulate a frenzy of the individual, atomistic view of the world where people's rights are mixed up with utopian ideas of equality and racial and religious harmony. It's a fervent dialogue in which the practice's carried on outside the protected bubble of living on these islands is ignored for a welter of criticism at an easy target.  These young men and women are very articulate but forget that their ability to speak out with such viperous freedom would be forbidden in the homeland of their parents and grandparents. It occurs to them not a fig that the rights they demand are the very rights denied in the far off home where their relatives still live. Their excitement is that of the child released from the nursery who's presumes the security therein is there of a right and not hard won over decades of struggle.