Who has time for fundamentals

How much more fulfilling it is to write than to read. 

Whilst not having the professional finished glaze of a fully paid up journalist or writer, still less the expertise of the expert, I still feel a stronger pull to expressing my own feelings than to read something similar from others.

Where do the words and phrases come from. 
You might start with an idea, something you saw, something you heard, something you dreamt but as the words go down on the page the piece begins to take on a form of its own. Words create avenues of thought, they glean new insights into what you think, they lead you on like a temptress into new fields of thought.
It's as if in the barrier between the conscience and the sub conscience is porous, a leaking membrane of reconstructed ideas and thoughts that tumble out to be digested and made whole by linking it with conscience experience.
It's quite exciting to read back and see how your hypotheses has developed with the telling. How the construction grew, a window fitted here to let new light in and a door there to gain access to another related idea. It's a journey which is founded on much we knew but is now embellished with other ideas, the reading of which make one smile with satisfaction or grimace with embarrassment if the conclusion has revealed more of oneself than you wished.
The difficulty is knowing when to stop and that of course begs the question "do you write for yourself or for the reader". If it's for yourself with an eye to the reader then given the impossibly short attention span of people today used to having their minds prompted by the television it's hard when many people complain my blog pieces are too long. It's the age of Twitter and the abbreviated code of text speak. The shorter the better. It's as if we had entered a world where there is a continuous firework display, ideas shooting off into the sky the substance of each subsumed by the next wiz bang. There's no pause, the noise of the display is enough, no cognisance is needed as the image is enough. Substance is an anathema it takes time and effort and anyway the scene is changing so fast who has time for fundamentals.

We are only human

  

The world seems to be made up of two different types of people.

The one sees the world through their 'own' needs, the other, through 'other' people's needs.
It's as simple as that.
The priorities of the first are clear they identify with their own specific issues. They understand the world through their own domain. They recognise other people through the commonality (if there is any) of their own ideas. They recognise the substance of their own plight through the plight of people who share their background.
Sixty years ago this concept was common across the nation, in fact it was common across all nations of the world. It was the bedrock of society, it represented a uniform platform, a measuring stick to guide you. Depending on which neighbourhood you lived in, people were largely the same.The sameness and the ignorance of much outside your neighbourhood created a unity amongst those you knew and lived alongside
The second person existed but as a tiny minority. They were on the fringes of society and were represented for instance by Beatrice's and Sidney Webb and the Fabian Society. These people were resolute in searching for answers in areas where a mismatch occurred, they were consumed with the need to "put right the wrongs" as they saw them. They were humanitarians.
Ignorance is both a bane and a bliss, too much knowledge disturbs that equilibrium we yearn for and of course today we have information overload, an industry of soothsayers, apologists, appeasement experts, people who exploit every wart, every attempt at being an individual, of having views which are nonconformist.
Not conforming is a heresy. Only if we pull together in the one direction, a direction we are told is the correct for all, as a collective, one they manipulate into a single unitary theoretically homogeneous unit.
Religion talks of a single god who loves us all and yet the institution of religious faith, the churches here on earth are at loggerheads with each other.
Humanitarians speak of the unity inherent in mankind's love and respect for each individual towards the other but whilst a lordly aim, it fails in reality so many tests.
From a beggar thy neighbour approach of Donald Trump, to the seemingly genuine concern of Obama towards the myriad hues of a complex world.
With the swirling nature of the African diaspora, like the dust from a Dervish dance obliterating the perspective, the reasons to be magnanimous are drowned by the scale.
We can't take it in, the myriad customs and affiliations which are totally foreign to us but have to be assimilated and more than just assimilated, given preference for a political end which is not our own.
Has the multicultural idea seen its day, overtaken by events which distorted any chance of a natural evolution. Was the idea bonkers to start with. Simply a dream or a guide towards behaviour such as "love they neighbour as yourself". It was never meant literally but simply to pose the paradox of getting along for the common good. But when the common good begins to feel threatening for the bulk of people then one has to recognise, we are only human !!

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.

The death of Fidel Castro

With the death of Fidel Castro another part of the jigsaw of events which started with the Russian Revolution and the advent of communist ideology comes to a close.

Fast forward through the Leninist/Stalinist years to the period after the Second World War when communism really became an international force with communist sympathies
emerging all over the world. China, Vietnam, Korea countries in Africa and countries in South America where uprisings by colourful revolutionaries such as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro defeated the local dictatorship and created pockets of communist rational amongst the myriad poor in that stricken continent. Even today we see the pitiful contrast between the rich and the poor in Brazil, although carefully scripted, it was impossible not to see the Favala rising up the slopes of the hillsides around Rio de Janeiro.
Having grown up 'to the sound of a distant drum' be it in Eastern Europe, Asia, or Latin America, the conflict was always the West against Communism. Underlying the politics was the clash between Capitalism, 'a free wheeling use of financial resources' and the concept of a centralised "planned economy" where government controlled everything.
Even today I have friends who wistfully look back on the days of the USSR and miss the paternalism of those years. For us growing up in that era there was always conflict, always the clarion call to the barricades to shore up defences. Always the spectre of the bogeyman, the hidden force destined to do evil.
Castro was the charismatic, cigar chomping persona behind the that other way of doing business. John F Kennedy the urban youthful, good-looking dynamic versus the camouflaged battle dress, wild man of Cuba.
Today Havana is slowly recovering decades of under investment and repair. It's baroque style, it's flamboyant music, it's dance and the physicality of it young people all tell a tale of its unwillingness to concede. With all the financial weight the USA threw at him Castro succeeded in holding his people together using the tried and tested method of educating and protecting his people when they became ill. The youth of Cuba were amongst the most highly educated in the world, doctorates by the bucket load. The health service although creaking under the strain of embargo was a marvel.
It's interesting to reflect that in this country with all the opportunities to trade and provide an economic platform for the people, only a lessening proportion of the population are gaining any advantage as our education system is dissolving at only a slightly lesser pace than our health system. It is, as it always was a question of priorities.
Castro has his people's plight in his sights. Not globalised markets or special cabals with protection ensured. Not the obsession of the free market, still less the liberalisation of all markets so that regulation, designed to protect the weak is thrown out with an eye to ensuring only the strong succeed.
The Americans hated him, fed by the venom of rich Cubans who had fled to Florida when he overthrew President Batista they have fought their fellow countrymen for decades and only under Obama has the recognition, that this tiny island state has a right to exist emerged.
Castro lived to see the day, only just. The CIA made many attempts on his life but were not quite as accomplished as the KGB or for that matter MOSAD in this clandestine business and so he survived.
Revolutionaries paid homage to him whilst the Establishment reviled him, perhaps there is no more fitting epitaph !!!

When time was on our side

There was a time in the past when life was a simple thing to be experienced as a series of events particular to yourself. The outside world was cut off by a few miles of fields, the distant drone of traffic was leisurely since only a few could purchase a car or more importantly, felt the need to. The world and its proverbial oyster lay all around but not too far, that most of it couldn't be reached on foot or occasionally by the bus. The intricacies of our lives were local and not international, our friendships were with people we had grown up with and came from the same stock. Summer was a time of endless evenings when one escaped the strictures of guidance and guided yourself were ever your fancy took you. The nooks and crannies of the surrounding countryside were our hiding place, where we met up or trudged in twos and threes to meet and discuss what we were going to do next. There was no pre-planned agenda only the slow moving river of chance to catch our eye and trigger a thought which provoked action. We were innocently happy in our ignorance and allowed to persevere so by the absence of grown ups to determine what "they" thought more industrious.
Of course over the  next hill beyond the next milepost the actual world beckoned but we were oblivious of its calling or consequence.
Today we read of the turmoil in young people's lives as they feel forced, like pot house plants to present themselves for the toil of life's path at an ever earlier stage. The route of education and "success" is hatched earlier and earlier and the measurement of our very soul is made the business of "others".
The self awareness which developed slowly at a pace commensurate with our bodies is now the subject of departmental reports and media scrutiny. Under the microscope we look very different as we are dissected into parts. The whole person and their beautiful uniqueness is forgotten for a target of economic success, for fitting in to a plan not of our own making. Is it any wonder that suicide is on the up amongst the young or that mental illness is common. As we tinker with that most delicate flowering process fitting everyone into the same mould, developing within them the same aims do we not miss the creative, instinctual  development that people of my generation took for granted.

A view from the "Greasy Spoon"

Sitting in the "greasy spoon"one sees a whole side to humanity that is normally hidden.

People use these places as community centres, a place to have a cup of tea and a bacon butty and a chat with friends. Time is irrelevant, work is a far off mirage something remembered with a sort of fondness but now, on Benefits there is no need.
Time hangs slowly, each cup of tea or coffee is a sort of full stop between the periods of lassitude, a moment when they can remember when they had things to do and places to go. Wrapped in shawls to ward off the cold the faces peer out wreathed in care lines worn with worry, eyes darting around summing up the dangers as well as the opportunities, creatures of the Wild Wood always on guard.

I'm in an Arcade of small shops well, nearly shops since one stands on the outside transacting business with a shrewd, fly by night trader for goods that may or may not have fallen off a truck. The mobile phone is the most transacted item, the SIM cards and the protective covers. No security code is too difficult to bypass no request too risky, this is the street trader existing on the margins, one stop away from the open suitcase and an eye open for the cops.
Across from where I sit there is a beauty parlour where the women, always the optimist fight off the advancing years with a potion of this, an extension of that and a touch of paint as and when required. The fortunes women spend on the impossible fight against the ravages of time is worth half the national debt. Food on the table takes a back seat to a foliage treatment and wrinkle removal cream, we are after all more than what we appear but what we appear is more important, after all we can blag the rest.
The ubiquitous  Union Jack is draped across the back wall.  Few "Remainer's" in here although there is a steady stream of people who would claim a linage elsewhere.
At the moment a large black guy who claims linage with Mohamed Ali and George Foreman is treating us all to a loud diatribe of invective mixed with his love for England. His mind addled with Tennents Extra Strong Cider and a lifetime of marijuana is but an example of the flotsam and jetsam of a large multicultural city. Accepted, if not condoned people ignore him and eventually he drifts away to blast someone else. His day a mixture of images of who knows what, his nights probably spent in a refuge or a doorway somewhere, waiting the outcome of one more night in his Hell's Kitchen of an existence.

Not a place to redeem

It's often the case when you take the foot off the neck the dog bites you.

Within days of Donald Trump declaring his scepticism of Americas involvement in NATO the Russian announce placing missals in one of their vassal states.
Is this the start of a cold war or just the logical outcome of Americas continuing  interfering since the end of the Second World War, in the export of the. so called 'democratic process, which interfered with the election of someone they didn't like. 

A case in point is The Ukraine. Viktor Yanukovych who was the elected President of Ukraine was pro Russia and seen as not sufficiently pro EU. He had to be removed (2014) from office for fear of derailing the US in its drive to draw in the old satellite countries of the USSR, countries surrounding Russia, into an alliance with the EU, and incidentally setting up anti ballistic missile sites as part of a strategic containment program. 

A so called pro-democracy party, which in fact really resembled a bunch of fascist thugs was gathered together to promote unrest  on the streets, forcing the President to flee the country and eventually Parliament was overturned. The resultant tit for tat invasion of Crimea by Russia and the uprising of the Russian segment of the population followed and today we have an uneasy standoff with the country torn down the middle.
Of course if one had to choose between a Russian dictatorship or an American one, for us in the West there is no argument as to which to choose but the overt use of force, be it by tanks on Russia's side, or a financial and political insurrection by the Americans has a similar ring to it regarding what constitutes a sovereign state.
Iraqi, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Egypt, its a long list of ill conserved interventions undertaken on behalf of the drive to democratise these highly tribal countries and which has brought mayhem to the Middle East. Heavy handed dictatorship and oppression kept the conflicting forces of tribal affiliation under wraps but the "Athenian conjecture" that States are places of like minded people with common aims yearning for a system of governance where virtually everyone gets their say, is not in anyway ripe for much of the world, including China. 

Why must we in the West wish to foister our political concepts on the rest of the world through "Regime Change". I suppose it's ideological uniformity much like religious conformity where intolerance to your view is met with hatred.

 Trump at least seems to think it's all a lot of baloney and appears to want to face the world as a place to do business with, not as a place to redeem.