What a rotton country this is

 

Subject:What a rotten country this is.

It's interesting how the temperament of different nationalities provokes a different response to certain subject matter regarding my blogs. The people who are more frontier spirited, who's parents emigrated to new lands within the last 80 or so years have a willingness to retain old fashioned ideas of how society works. They reflect, as I do, that because something is new and mimics the word on the street, that we must be flexible in accepting new things, more understanding when old norms are trashed and that change is always a good thing.
Most people would agree that flexibility and understanding are needed throughout our lives but if we are asked to be flexible about something we have reservation about then our reservations must be equally valid and we must be allowed to voice those reservations without being taken to the social equivalent of the stocks and pilloried with taunts of bigotry or being called a racist.
In this country we have been forced fed a diet of divergence, we have been drip fed ideas of what is right and what is wrong based on a modern concept that if someone claims their need to signal that they are unique in some way or other we must aggregate their claim with all the others flowing from a society which gives it an equal footing to everything that went before it, which in no way resembles my concept of what was the normal I grew up with.  The extent of the change culturally and sociologically has been massive and the indigenous people, such as myself have had to conform to a huge reorganisation of social norms from those in the 1940s / 50s and of course before. Change was slow and grew from a need of the people who lived here to change based on their own needs and perception of what was acceptable or not. 
From the late 40s many of these changes were not organic, not the result of a slow maturation, a maturing natural change but instead were forced upon us by the political class and its need to create a multicultural, multifaceted, multi faced society. The extent to which people were consulted in any way was minimal, rather they were told they had to conform or else and to avoid a witch hunt they kept  their heads down and offered little or no comment on their difficulty in understanding, let alone absorbing the cultures and religious practices which these minorities brought with them into the social mix, pressing their claim for greater recognition and not just recognition, not just parity but a claim for preeminence.
Everyone has rights but it seems minority rights count for more than majority rights, in fact one could go so far as to say the majority relinquished their rights for fear of being labelled prejudiced.  One only has to see the pressure put on dissenting voices if the trend to worship at the alter of some minority cause is questioned and given the power of Twitter and Facebook to trash viable but in the eyes of the new commentariat, misinformed views, and debate withers into populist sloganeering.

I'm uncomfortable for instance with the pressure Louis Hamilton applies to the other racing drivers standing on the grid of a Formula 1 race, to kneel in acknowledgement to 'Black Lives Matter'. Of course they do but it's Hamilton's condemnation of those drivers who don't kneel and refuse to be pressured to do so that annoys me. Slogans have a power of there own. "Your Country Needs You" comes to mind with Lord Kitchener invoking patriotic symbolism to encourage young manly white working class lads to take the Queens shilling and enlist in the army. What he failed to mention was the enormous casualty rate in trench warfare where men were sent over the top to die in their thousands as the likes of Kitchener failed to value the lives of his fellow countrymen. This lack of a value on people who are not privileged by birth is not just a Black thing it covers the whole of humanity. The jobs, the promotion, the health, where you live and how you live is equally defined by the accent you have or your lack of educational attainment due to the poor provision of educational facilities as it is by the colour of your skin. Evidence the success of the Indian community versus their neighbours, Pakistan in this country. 
I'm not saying race doesn't play a part but then so does so many other variables such as parental aspiration which hold back the white child just as much as a black child. There are so many black people who's success challenges the idea that being black is a hurdle too high to climb. If being black in a predominantly white society (am I still allowed to describe it so) is a disadvantage then the prejudice must also be assumed to flow the other way and of course it does. I don't have to fly far to encounter prejudice, the French have a long standing dismissal of the English, not for being black but for being perfidious. The prejudice of being white in Africa depends on the nation your in, the prejudice in Asia likewise. In Japan they won't let you in as a non Japanese person without serious qualifications and even in the old commonwealth countries the hurdles are getting higher to gain admittance and be accepted and all the while this is happening, we in this country still have an open door for the cousins of those who live here and who profess what a rotten country this is.