The Parable according to John

 

Subject: Parable according to John.

What purports to go through my head, the thoughts and responses to current affairs and the incidents of yesterday which become the subject of today's blog are the thoughts of the many not the few. They are untarnished by a great deal of ideological set piece thinking and they certainly don't tow a party line. Rather they are a response to what is happening around us and the incautious approach of people in power.

My views are those wishing to call out the extremist, to offer a view which takes both sides into the equation. Unfortunately there are fewer and fewer who seem to want to do this these days and ideological extremism is more and more prevalent especially with the rich and powerful. The ballot box was usually a constraint on the more extreme views and the national boat negotiated the rapids with a punt here or there to keep the vessel going in more or less the direction the majority wanted.

My mind was the product of a country which seemed to avoid the swings to extremism, boringly smug with itself for allowing free speech and freedom of action so long as it showed some restraint. There were the red lines so favoured these days in the rhetoric of the personality fostered leader who comes to power not on merit but on his or her popularity on television or the questionable merits of the chatter on the internet.

Substance seems a thing of the past even the substance of the chap on the other side was predictable and the values of the society rooted in its institutions were entrenched in all our thinking. This common thread was what kept us off the barricades we understood that certain things were sacrosanct, they were what made us British.

Apparently we no longer wish this to be so and have opened our hearts to everyone and anyone especially if they seem to carry a grievance. We have become terrified of our own shadow as we couch behind the furniture of our own history and profess not to have known what that history was about. Nations with threadbare credentials have us over a barrel by a claim that we injured them but the injuries are based on modern concepts of what is right and what is wrong and we tie ourselves in knots trying to accommodate the claims from the weirdest quarters. The Human Rights Act which at heart is a good thing has been forced, by philosophical rather than practical reasoning to include on a parity basis virtually anyone who can make a claim for being overlooked.

And so in my head, wishing to be fair minded and objective yet in fear of upsetting someone who as yet I didn't know existed I write my parable, (according to John), much like the religious parables which set in a time when the story was much simpler and so much more believable.