Safty versus the economy

Subject: Safety versus the economy

So we are poised to return to work and play in an effort to get the economy going again.
The medical opinion is that if we enact the various safety measures such as protecting our doctors and nurses with sufficient PPE, having a proper testing system with a track and trace for those in the society who have come close to an infected person, to have a sensible measure when people are entering the country through our airports, and to keep the spare hospital capacity available for when we have a second spike in people laid low by the virus then we should be ok.
Unfortunately we have little confidence in any of the medical experts paraded each evening on our television screen nor the politicians who sign off on these preconditions. Promises have been made and broken over and over again by the politicians and our trust in the political establishment is at rock bottom.

Therefore when we return to work we know there will be an upturn in death from the virus and it's really a matter of how far these deaths will become acceptable and common place.
We don't analyse the dangers of a car journey or that the plane we due to fly in will crash, we assume that in a long list of medical complications we won't be on that list and  in fact throughout  life, it's optimism which keeps us going otherwise we would be crushed by a host of 'what ifs'.
The virus, and there are others heading our way, easily transferable through air travel, viruses which spend their lives in the animal kingdom but have learnt how to cross the species barrier and infect humans just as they do animals and are queuing up to inflict what is a purposeless process of cell destruction. If there there ever was such a thing as a creative scheme behind life's evolution then this seems pretty pointless.
Animals are allowed to die or are exterminated to prevent disease spreading and so a far less less draconian method such as permanently isolating the ones at high risk whilst at the same time compulsory testing is carried out when a person enters a high density environment such as a train or a bus, when they enter a shop or office or a sports arena with an immediate response if shown positive. We need a litmus test which shouts at us as soon as it turns blue, we need infra red temperature monitoring at home and in the street to tell us who has it and who hasn't. We need to adjust our sense of freedom or alternatively go to live in a society which is not as strict. We need to rearrange our priorities and if the overseas holiday is one of them, we have to accept quarantine when we get back. Sadly the general groundswell of comment coming back from business is get them back irrespective "I need to make money". The economy and making money in the short term will be the deciding factor. Ensuring safety for the population at large always did come far down the list.

All lives matter

Subject: All Lives Matter.

Events dear boy events. Some events stimulate, some inflame, some make you laugh and some make you cry. The human psych is so varied and often pre-programmed such that seen through different eyes the same event is interpreted in a different way.
Events then are the starting point, they are the stimulus to get us thinking and in my case writing. Sometimes we judge unfairly sometimes we are too hidebound, too soft, too forgiving but what ever the result is it's much better than disinterest or the claim of being too bored or busy to take any notice.
The Black Lives Matter debate continues to blanket our screens and from a black persons perspective the issue is raw since it garners so much of the injustice they see of being black in this country its part of their perceived failure to achieve, their failure to be judged for the person they are within this society.
For a white person (and I know this incites many people who think identity politics is a dangerous concept) living in what traditionally was assumed a white persons country,  largely because the bulk of people here, before 1947 were white, the issue has never really arisen. Much as feminism is a quirk of being a women, (a matter for which men fear to have an opinion) so also the LGBT community is an out-layer to many people's thought process and whilst individually there is simply no difference, collectively the movement in their name seem to amplify not only our lack of knowledge from both sides but the opaque way we view most things in life.
One of the most striking things about the Black Lives Matter movement is the intensity it brings to focus on ones self image and to do a calculation on how you rate in society at large.
If you have a sense of grievance it is amplified and the grievance has a convenient hook to place that grievance on. The reason why I was not promoted was because I was black, the reason I failed at school was because I was bullied because I was black, the name calling when tempers are inflamed makes me as a black person a target, the isolation I feel in the society at large is because I am black and it's unfair.
These hooks are genuine but not unique to a black person. Bullying, being targeted, not getting a job (never mind promoted) and the feeling of isolation in parts of the country in its towns and cities is  just as much a problem to a white person as it is to a black person the difference is there is no ethnicity focus, there is no banner to march under.
The lost voice of the white working class person used to be protected by the labour movement but after a brief flirtation with proper socialism under Jeremy Corbyn unfortunately, that  ship has sailed and we are back with a middle class, politically correct agenda where matters such as LGBT rights get tabled and debated to the exclusion of the under performing, poorly educated white working class child who is off the media radar.
Black Lives Matter, of course they do but so do White Lives, Asian Lives, in fact the whole gambit of human life matters and it's wrong to proclaim that because what happens in America is somehow equivalent to what happens here.  If so then we must include what happens in China or India, the Middle East, in fact all countries across the globe, for a better perspective.
The influence the media gives to any 'identity' political issue usually inflames the subject beyond all recognition. The activists seize the microphone and seek to exploit their own agenda, their own sense of their identity crisis. It might be a genuine agenda but it might also inflate the prejudice they already have (and we all have prejudice) and it will likely drive a wedge between people with ill thought through rhetoric, much like Donald Trump uses to divide his nation and it will deliver a body blow to those who genuinely see themselves as individuals not representatives of their race or gender, performing to the best of their ability and finding success is often directly proportional to the effort you put in.

Who do we trust

Subject: Who do we trust

Having had explained the X Ray images taken by an orbiting telescope far out in space, and the forces at play as galactic events play out in the cosmos, black holes and disintegrating stars, mind boggling emissions  of energy, enough to destroy our own galaxy, one is forced to wonder at the place of god in all this.
The energy released and destroyed is on the edge of physics as we know it. Far from stable it is destructive and its purpose more the elemental balance between mass and the forces which created the structure of mass in the first place.
Stretching the metaphor and on the opposite end of the spectrum I listened fascinated to a House of Lords sitting of one of these committees where it is able to test the minds of the experts, in this case the Immunologists and medical scientists who are leading the fight to understand the corona virus and ways to combat it. It was edge of the chair stuff and whilst my mind has not been trained to follow the relevance of many of the medical terms I was able to scale the wall, hanging on to the handholds of what I do know, for instance  a virus contains the following components (a). A nucleic acid genome and (b) a protein capsid that covers the genome. Together this is called nucleocapsid. In addition many animal viruses contain (c) a lipid envelope and the entire virus is called a virion. These terms were batted around as they described the traumatic effect of the thrombosis in the blood vessels particularly in the lungs and the drugs used to try to offset the effects of the thrombosis.
And so we have the fields of scientific exploration. The astral with their long term observations and mathematical hypothesise and the short term rush of the medical scientist as they battle to understand the virus and find some sort of remedy to the destruction it produces.
Both worlds are fascinating and reveal more of what we don't know than what we do. One has an innate sense of security listening to these professors debate the findings and hypothesise, the opinions based on known facts and far removed from the political circus, the lies and deceit of a government who are their masters, at least as far as the funding to do their research is concerned.
Democracy was thought to be the best system of ironing out the prejudice of a dictatorship but with the manipulation of the electorate with its slavish use of the internet for information one wonders if the voting public is not too susceptible to the Machiavellian tricks of another Cambridge Analytica

I had a dream

Subject: I had a dream.

One of the most difficult bridges to cross is the one which tells me that everything is ok in a world peopled with such divergent views. It's as if the people who make light of the divisions amongst us have fallen for their own hype without looking around and seeing the world as it is.
The world is a mess, it always was, it's peopled by Individuals who have developed their own sense of who they are and in doing so they create an artifice to deceive others and protect that which is valuable to them. Every tribe, every nation, every religion and every ethnicity has skin in the game as they seek to survive the claim and counter claim of the others around. Globalisation has sort to minimise these differences and sell the concept of oneness, of elemental sameness be it race or gender. The identification of difference is frowned upon, it's become an anathema to accept that cultural inheritance makes us different from birth. As children we see and imbibe the functions which people perform daily, not merely to survive but to identify themselves with their close neighbours all for the sake of belonging to a community.
For the last 25 years Western academia has expressed the need for a political construct, an ideological sameness who's agenda is a sort of interchangeable commodity across the whole of mankind, a sort of Orwellian led thought control project where 'people are taught what to think before they are even aware that thinking is actually about choice'.
Listening to the excuses for the poor choices made in the course of the pandemic, or listening to the groundswell of disharmony and self loathing as street marches gather on our streets protesting issues of race, horrified at police brutality, absorbing the condemnation of our white society like a flagellating sponge, as if we alone had created the idea of self identification.
The world is rife with conflict, of how people see each other and what the other person stands for and it's been this way for time immemorial. Our tolerance as a nation is as good, if not better than in so many other parts of the world but this tolerance is never the topic of debate rather its the underlying discontent within the society at large with the laws in that society which were put in place to ensure the society doesn't harm itself, and of course, the main condemnation these days is toward the very people who are there to enforce them.
The ratios are trotted out about 'stop and search', why are so many black people are searched in our towns and cities. The fact that many of these cities have become religious and ethnic ghettos, in part by created wholesale immigration and the difficulty the immigrant has in finding like minded people to live and settle amongst. He created his own version of a suburb in Karachi or Lagos and with these hot spots of racial exclusivity in place, the gangs hold their turf. At night a white youth seen in certain areas of Lambeth, Toxteth  or Little Horton is in danger whilst and the same is true for a black person seen in an area which the white youths claim as theirs.  During the daytime multiculturalism works but at night the ordinary man and woman, working families, stay at home living a normal family life in front of the television but in the street younger, often aggressive young men are the people the police come into contact with and with the stimulation of drugs, everything escalates, mental aberration becomes  the mindset to ignore the pain of authority and it all becomes highly dangerous.  Is it any wonder the police, facing this drug fueled antagonism become battle hardened.
The bobby we know who helps the little old lady across the road or you approach to get directions becomes a different person when confronted in the war zone which our inner cities have become over the last 15 years. His survival is on the line and who would blame him or her for combating violence with violence.

These realities are ignored by the academic wishing to prove, or test a social point. Never out on the streets after dark, rather tucked up in bed with Horlicks and Proust, they dream of a better land where rational debates heal the wounds of conflict, not the slender knife blade thrust into someone's chest.
Imagine their dismay at the savagery of an honour killing or the removal of the hand of a pickpocket. Imagine the quarrel 1500 years ago which segregated the Shia from the Sunni and caused so much enmity still as unresolved as the day it started. Imagine in their world of rational debate an irrational force much more ingrained, much more relevant to millions and millions of people  than their multicultural dream.
But no their focus is on us, a tiny island in the North Sea undergoing severe economic disintegration and a pandemic which has been made much worse by the incompetence of a government only recently elected, largely on the distortion of a single entity issue Brexit, with a huge majority, a government which can do much as it pleases for the next five years.

We are in for a rough ride made so much rougher by sowing disharmony and perhaps unintentionally widening the gap between the people who live here.

Black lives matter

Subject: Black lives matter.

The human psychic seems so easily shifted from peace to violence. It doesn't take much for football fans to erupt in anger at a decision which goes against them. It doesn't take much for law abiding citizens to be confirmed opponents of a scheme if news papers publish incendiary stories or the news editor contrives a headline which reflects the papers bias not the facts on the ground. Young men easily whipped up by the jingoism of Kitchener, enlisted in their hundreds of thousands to go to war, or the mob on the streets of Minnesota who become frenzied  as they egg each other on and focus their helpless rage against authority. 

'A policeman's lot is never a happy one' according to Gilbert and Sullivan in their Pirates  of Penzance opera and watching the police face off with the angry crowd one is reminded of the dreadful dilemma of a 'them and us' situation where the police are seen as the enemy, not the security we need in our neighbourhoods.

The world has its fair share of really bad people and of course, since the police force is made up of people there are some amongst them. Actions made under the pressure of a conflict situation exacerbate the action and confrontation overwhelms common sense.
The latest killing seems to come from the contempt and the brutality inherent in overt authority. I don't think it was the policeman's intention to kill but the power of knowing that the uniform protected him from the constrains which limit our own violence meant he was obsessed with that power and failed to listen to the pleas of the victim. His fellow officers were similarly constrained by their collegiate understanding of non interference between each other and the mantra 'watch each other's back'.
'It's a war out there', I'm sure is the common refrain amongst law enforcement officers, particularly in the USA,  who's job it is to stick their noses into the sewer which awful conditions breed amongst those forced to live there. The hostility and the brutality are on both sides but we rarely hear from the well meaning protesters of the drug inspired brutality meted out by the gangs who the police regularly come into conflict with.

The contempt is on both sides but of course we expect more from a trained force of men who should be guided into letting the courts decide what to do with the detainee but savagery is never far away from the human condition. The marvel is that there is so little overt savagery around given the daily contest which goes on for a limited piece of bread.

Savagery is a strong word. One thinks of a savage dog, out of control and dangerous, one thinks of violence, viciousness, ferocity, all words which could be interspersed with savage when one sees a crowd rampaging through the streets hurling rocks or breaking windows to gain access to shops. We see a disciplined line of police officers protected by their helmets, staves in hand advancing towards the crowd.  What goes through our mind.  Is this state brutality.  The weapons, the tear gas and the indemnity make the police hold the upper hand but we fear this overt use of force when used on civilians. We see the civilian as one of us, a protester with rights, a needful counterbalance to the power of the state. We see the State as representing other interests to our own, interests of the few and not the many, we see the police as upholding those powerful minority rights and are unhappy with our inequality.
The 'them and us' is at work sowing it's seeds of hate and distrust on both sides, neither side having the moral upper hand. The Constitution (if there is one) lends an ear to both and it's only afterwards when the people go home and the rocks are swept away,  do we ask ourselves the question " how did we get here".

Sent from my iPad

Risk and our divided view

Subject: Risk and our divided view.

How do we evaluate risk, how do we reach conclusions which place ourselves in situations where we understand that there are risks and along with the risk, danger.

How do we view danger when we have to accept that there is some danger in virtually everything we do. The motor car journey, the airline trip to a holiday destination, the dingy sailor or the kayak enthusiast, the rock climber or the downhill skier describe the variations in human acceptance of danger.
Danger today is different from the social acceptance we had 50 years ago in those days we encouraged our sons and daughters to go out and experience new adventures on the basis that danger whilst present could be negotiated and good old common sense was a good antidote. Our children were used to escaping the parental overview. Kids would go, on their own, to meet up with friends to climb trees, and ride bikes, would tease each other to do things which had an increased risk. We were out all day in the fields and woods and if you lived in a village we worked and played amongst farm animals helping the farmer, especially at harvest time when we were of use gathering the bundles of hay and stacking them together. The combined harvester was not a special threat, the cows in the milking shed, the pigs in their sty, only the bull was off limits.
The risks today is that if I go for a walk I might meet someone contaminated with the virus, I increase that risk if I go into a crowded shop and therefore I treat the risk, given my age differently, as someone who is continually at risk of becoming seriously ill. I can cut out the risk by deciding not to go out or I can decide to take a risk, just like I do when I travel by car or fly and ignore it.
Of course we, as a society are not disciplined like the Japanese or even the Germans, we are more likely to thumb our collective nose at authority and have a built in aversion to being told what is good for us. The process of wearing a mask and cleaning surfaces  in a store each time a client has transacted business is foreign to us, it seems to  fly against our sense of reserve and our independence.
The large gatherings last weekend at a series of beauty spots and on beaches, was an example of the Innate ignorance and bloody mindedness of a poorly educated society and a perfect example of many people's approach to risk, ignore it.
The mass gatherings against police brutality is another case in point. The risk of transmission is magnified by a factor of 10 in a large crowd and yet we were out in our thousands protesting, its as if there is a dual reality going on. The stern admonishment evoked  by the politicians regarding social gathering was contrasted by the inevitable disbelief we now have that what ever a politician says  is a lie and leads a segment of society to raise two fingers towards the political system. Many people have lost trust in their leaders and also the so called scientific experts who flank them. This lack of trust has been a long time coming and reflects the British way of circumspection with facts, not trusting the publics reaction to bad news, they obfuscate and manipulate rather than share. "The we know better" divide has always been amongst us, a divide accentuated  by a divisive education system which encourages the 'them and us mentality'. Through the corridors of business and commerce, education and social interaction we carry and even encourage this belief in the divide. Is it any wonder when we need everyone to pull together that the divide raises it ugly head.

Hot air and inaccuracies

Subject: Hot air and inaccuracies. 

It's eerie to think that the films we watch today on Netflix or made for television last year were made when the world was a very different place. The street scenes, the offices were all filmed in that world which followed the period of black and white moves and colour movies in the pre virus era when people mixed and cavorted without masks. It was a period when aeroplanes flew regularly and you could buy a ticket without a medical examination. It was a time when people used to meet at restaurants and in pubs to say hi and swop stories. It was a time when doctors surgeries and hospitals treated a whole range of things not just Covid 19, when to enter a hospital wasn't like entering a war zone with specially contrived routes to get around open spaces and sanitisers positioned on every corner. It was a time when you parked your car and entered the shop of choice without a queue and a limit on how many people could enter the shop at any one time.
Looking at the film made only last year the environment we lived in was so totally different. There was no sight on the faces of the people appearing that this was a finale, a final showing of life before the virus arrived and the pandemic got under way. There was no flag waving in the streets, no last hurrah as the curtain came down, no drum roll, no Vera Lynn melody to sing us all to sleep.

Instead we woke up in January to a news story from Wuhan in china, one of those eternal stories of people far away facing some sort of trauma but as usual, remote enough not to register. The following few days there was a quickening of the blood and more attention as our trusted politicians nervously mounted the rostrum to announce restrictions, well not actually restrictions rather a polite sort of "help us out" and oh please stop shaking hands (even though our esteemed Prime Minister continued to do so) above all "wash your hands" became the mantra. Slowly but surely the volume was ramped up and the worried face of the politicians began to recite their new lines disclaiming what they had said the day before. 'Lock down, everybody inside', no more work until further notice was announced to a public throughly confused as to the seriousness of the matter having been informed that it wasn't serious.

We learnt that it killed but only the old and infirmed. We discovered that the Old Age Care Homes had been forgotten in the rush to reorganise the hospitals and had become the new charnel houses with, in some cases, as many as 50% of the inmates dying. No one thought to close the door and isolate the poor old buggers.

One minute testing was the flavour of the month (as it still remains across the world) but we knew better (as we always do) and stopped testing. We now find was due to the inadequacy of our testing labs, and the insistence we use only the NHS ones which, due to a chronic shortage of funding were unable to provide the analysis.

Another instance of running down stocks to balance the budget, the protective equipment for frontline doctors and nurses, desperately needed in their fight to keep patients alive, was unavailable, stocks run down and unable to be replenished because our 'one supplier' need them to fight the disease at home in china. No war time spirit was evoked by letting our own industry get on with producing the PPE, instead, companies, able and willing, are still waiting 'the return call' from the ministry.
From beginning to end we have shown the world how 'second rate' we have become. How incompetent we are at pressing the right buttons, how ignorant even of which button to press.
With Brexit just down the track and the guys in charge being the same ones who made such a mess of providing for the pandemic, I feel for the country. Ideologues, blindly wanting to get out, chanting the same jingoistic phrases, much like the pandemic phrases, full of hot air and inaccuracies.