Nothing is a gimme

 

Subject: Nothing is a gimme

Prior to two world wars young men were conscripted into the armed services to face an enemy who wished him dead. There was no consideration of his willingness or otherwise it was his duty to fight for King and country.

His mother or wife were expected to eke out from pitiful rations, food to feed a family whilst at the same time being coopted into a munitions factory or onto a farm to add to the war effort.  That’s within the lifetime of people still living and one wonders what they think of the media coverage constantly uncovering the worst case scenario, the most harsh cases of mental deprivation in an effort to sensationalise the news. We are now used to a foreshortened lens magnifying the disruption in a bombed or shelled city. We see countries through the battered and blooded victims of torture, we see it through the  clamour  of special pleading, we see it through the perceived woes of people who have in comparison to wartime, little to complain about. Get a grip I say to all those who have a job but still complain about not being able to go out, count your blessings and stop carping, it's the ones who's employment has closed I feel sorry for, the awful inability to meet the constant bills, especially if you have a family to provide for.

No one is sure how much more deprivation we will have to endure. There are nations who grow up under a cloud of unremitting deprivation and hardship. The television beams out stories of the lack of sanitised water, of gaunt eyed starving children under going the last stages of a horror story which has been the hallmark of their short lives.

We add in the floods which have swept their homes and possessions away and we marvel at their tenacity to cling on to life, almost immediately starting with the scraps lying around to rebuild some sort of shelter to crouch under. The old and the young sharing so little but with an instinctive desire to survive. We need that spirit here, the revelation that rights are a privilege and in the scheme of things whilst we are immeasurably better off, nothing is a gimme !!