Living within ones means

  

Should we ditch the concept of social awareness, should we pull the plug on the growing financial black hole we call the Benefit System. Given our financial plight, with tax receipts not covering our current account and borrowings nearly out of control  can we afford the philanthropic objective which started as "social justice", in helping people who had fallen through the social cracks, to today's definition based on "rights" and a cultural shift where people aim to advance their lives within the envelope of a Benefit Culture.

Listening to "Any Answers" people rang in to question the insistence of people today demanding everything they want 'immediately' not willing to put off the purchase until they can afford it.

This assumption that life is intolerable if we don't have 'stuff' is a modern concept probably sown, along with the creation of the credit card, to inculcate in the masses that we ain't had it so good, whilst in fact we are plunging into bottomless debt with all the pressures and stress owing money brings. People can not understand the pride of self containment, in not being owned by anyone, in being able to 'cock a snoop' at any group or individual if you strongly disagreed.

The 'make do' was a strong emotional backstop.  It represented you as you were, no flashy condiments to your life  and if I may I strongly contend we were better off because of it.  We were grounded in a specifically individualistic way which bred 'our own' identity, not the identity founded on a Market compilation of a 'consumer' but a real person confident in what we wished to be.

Unadorned simplicity is crucial to our lives. We are who we are without being clothed in the Emperors new clothes. "Doing without" has a strong moral characteristic, there is strength in self imposed limits, it used to be the 'sine qua non' of people who felt proud to belong to the "working class" and the sense of integration it developed amongst like minded people. The "second hand", the "refurbished", the "mended" were all terms of thrift and self sufficiency. That term "self sufficiency" was emblematic of a society who valued themselves in the eyes of their brothers not as the owner of a new Jag but as someone who could make things work who could be trusted, who's word was valued more than all the flashy adornments which seem these days to be so sort after.