The Underdog.

One of the endearing aspects of the British is their support for the underdog. Uruguay are playing Australia at rugby and the crowd are very vocally behind Uruguay. It was the same the other day when Japan played South Africa. The whole stadium (except the South Africans) were screaming for the Japanese as they attacked the South African line in the dying minutes of the game.

We seem to have it in our DNA to reason an argument for the oppressed the underdog and give willingly to charities supporting issues of deprivation across the globe. Closer to home we seem less sure of our humanity. We have become so brain washed about our own needy that we find excuses and turn away. The individualism that has been garnered by the political ferment over the last decade or two seems to have got in the way of our view of our own society and its needs. We are aghast at the concept of collectively caring and supporting our own underdog in his or her struggle throughout life, we have become imbibed with the idea that we should all be able to cope. 

In effect society today is a much easier place than it was 50 years ago when true poverty and doing without was common, particularly in the cities in the North and their future was correspondingly bleak. Education was in those days based on a three tier system. The Private School, the Grammar School and the Secondary Modern School made up the tiers and in some ways was less devisory than today, allowing the clever pupil an opportunity to obtain the better jobs via the Grammar School.
Demolishing the Grammar option effectively erected a Berlin Wall between those who would succeed and those who were given a glimpse of Valhala but cruelly denied the real thing.
University placement was supposed to be a way out but unless you had a degree in the Sciences Medicine or Engineering many of the so called qualifications were useless and graduates were reduced to working in jobs which bore no relevance to the training they had received.
The underdog in the current society is someone who has been, in part the person who was made a political promise and the promise found to be hollow. Also that section of society who sought a life on Welfare by making themselves "available" and relying on the goodwill of society to look after the child are the unquestionable down side in the mechanism of social caring. Falling pregnant is either an act of will or a situation that could in all but a limited set of situations be avoided but the unmarried mother is no longer a phenomena, rather the norm and everyone pays a price.
The underdog in today's age is relevant specifically to a poor educational outlook and the fundamental economic change which has seen the work that the "under-educated" used to do, move off-shore to so called emergent nations. The underdog is a victim of change and is no less worthy of our concern than any charity project depicting what goes on overseas.