You will be a man my son

 Subject: You will be a man my son.

It’s interesting how “divide and rule” raises its ugly head every so often, specifically when we are being softened up to hide past political miss management. The blame game is used to seek discord and discord to weaken the efforts of everyone so that a goalless draw sends everyone home disappointed.

The latest divide being created is of the ‘young against the old’ rather than the ‘poor against the rich’, although the assumptions made are that the old are rich (at least in assets) and the young poor.

When I was growing up (how often these days I seem to use this phrase) the very young were encouraged to be “seen and not heard”, the adolescent encouraged to go to “night school” after serving their day learning a meaningful apprenticeship, young men and women were encouraged to provide each other with the bond of a life long secure marriage.

Today we revert to the babble of popularism where the latest trend or fashion displaces all that went before it. The young demand their rights from birth, they demand their education whilst rejecting the work and displacement of their time to obtain it, they demand their right to a house along with their right to a sky subscription, a couple of annual holidays abroad in the sun along with the lease on a motorcar which in my day only came to the director of a successful company. There’s no waiting, no scrimping and saving, no doing without until we could afford it. It’s this ‘rights culture‘ which has gripped us all, this foolish assumption that we are all born equal. We have been lulled into believing that it should be so when history tells us that it’s simply not true. We are not equal, we are not the same and unless the geneticist  get their sticky hands on us we never will be.

The danger in divide and rule is that we loose rather than gain our self respect. There was oceans of self respect, even pride in being working class, it bound us in a sense of commonality, of belonging and being counted, not for the BMW parked outside the door but in the way you behaved towards your peers. They were the ones you looked to not the people in the great houses or occupying the executive floor offices on tthey were the other folk with their strange pretensions. You were a fool if you envied them, they had to dress up and perform airs and graces when out and about which never troubled you in your down to earth life. Your strength was in your character, in your optimism and in your freedom to be yourself.

What  I see today are so many mimics, so much checking to see what others are doing, so much referencing from the smart phone, is it any wonder that there’s so much stress and mental strain. Leave the phone at home and explore your own world, the world you know and can aspire to, values you value not the pack values of a ‘rights led shibboleth’.

If you want to be different believe in your own assumptions, if you want to disagree and propound your own opinion then do so with good grace but if you want to upset the commonly held apple-cart and be, in their eyes, outrageous, good luck to you at least in Kiplingesque language “you’ll be a man my son”.