It’s only been a short time line.

 Subject: It’s only been a short time line.

Our personal priorities are not always aligned with our national priority, and as a nation we have changed out of all recognition from the one which had shakily emerged from the Second World War. The population in the 1940s was more subservient and more easily manipulated because people were largely individualised within by their cohort (class) and neighbourhood, today with  the ability to belong to a wider community through the internet and to identify ourselves with people of a like mind and interest whilst at the same time learning that so many people have a different mind set and therefore we are surrounded predominantly by difference.

The subtly of being able to equate difference and yet realise, or at least rationalise the danger of that difference to a  functioning society is paramount to our mental wellbeing. Today there seem so many subclasses from the simplified gender relevant construction we grew up with to the racial mix on our doorstep. The rough hewn self confident identity of 1945 to the intricate delicacy of 2024 were every year we find another descriptive sub set to consider as being on a par with what we considered normal. Everyone's normal has become equal and prescriptive and in a sense they are since there is no social template any more, only bias and bigotry.

Justification, which used to hinge on history and the ethnicity of the society around have now been replaced with a hippies tolerance such that, 'anything goes'.  This boundless freedom to fit into any cause simply distills who you are into a caste of misfits each yelling, "I am right".

Where we go from here is perhaps a prescription only AI will offer a solution since the confusion of a society our leaders have no knowledge of and still less care about leaves us stranded. Worker bees dedicated to the hive and the queen, warrior bees sacrificing their lives for the common good, and behind it all, the beekeeper hidden in his protective clothing, anonymous under the hat and suitably vailed for anonymity.

It’s all a long way from Constables Hay Wain painted in 1821 it still had relevance in 1921 and to some extent also when I appeared on the scene in 1940 where the rural setting around our village, the dray horses pulling the plow the children in the field around harvest time, the Maypole celebrations, the tight knit village community dancing in the community hall and the annual one day exodus to the seaside by many of the villagers in a charabanc. The society was free to engage with each other without the engagement of the smart phone and all its preemptive commitment. Of course the smartphone casts a wider net but like many a fisherman will tell you the catch is diminished by the holes in the net were a significant quota got away. At least with Doris by my side the catch was still within reach on the back seat.

The world has changed like never before and is accelerating ever faster. The link with your past is rapidly becoming irrelevant and with it the structure and values you formed over that passage of time. It’s not actually that the values have disappeared rather its the ability to articulate that value to those living in the current mode.