Tendring Topics………….on line
Feeding the Hungry – with words!
The top politicians of the world's wealthiest countries recently met in a blaze of publicity, to discuss the most serious threats facing mankind today. There was the growing problem of world hunger, the ever-accelerating pace of climate change, the threat of world economic recession, Iran's nuclear ambitions (which may or may not include the development of nuclear weapons) and the situation in Zimbabwe.
Iran's intentions and the state of Zimbabwe are undoubtedly important issues on which the future peace of the world may depend. I reckon though that they are the ones that cause least concern to the hungry, the poverty stricken and the HIV positive of the world, or to those increasingly threatened by drought, forest fires, hurricanes, typhoons and floods resulting from climate change.
It was however, perhaps as one might have expected, on the issues of sanctions against Iran and Zimbabwe issues that the greatest measure of agreement was reached. How much of that agreement will be honoured by each individual country and how much, if at all, the sanctions will change the policies of those two 'rogue states', remains to be seen.
As far as world hunger is concerned our own Prime Minister urged us all to waste less food; a timely injunction but with its impact just a little dented by the lavish banquet that the world's leaders enjoyed together when they had finished their sermonising. Oh yes – and they all renewed the promises of financial aid to the poorest nations that they had made a few years ago. Some of them didn't honour their promises then, so why should anyone imagine that they will do so now?
It was on their unanimity on tackling climate change that the top politicians seem to imagine they most deserved congratulation. They promised unanimously to reduce greenhouse gas emission by 50 percent in the next twenty years. On the insistence of the USA no attempt whatsoever was made to declare interim targets. Twenty years time! How fortunate that that is several General Elections, and Presidential Elections away! Few, if any, of those who signed the agreement will still be running the world's affairs in 2,028. It will be for their successors to explain how it was that the targets hadn't been met and that in any case they had been inadequate to deal with the enormity of the problem.
I shan't, nor would I wish to be around to say 'I told you so'.
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Go-ahead Frinton-on-Sea
Let no-one say that Frinton-on-Sea doesn't keep up with the times!
Their very genteel Golf Club for instance, once had a dress code that insisted that all male players should wear collars and ties on the green. That rule has long been relaxed and, for some time now not an eyebrow has been raised at players wearing shorts – knee-length of course; one must preserve the decencies!
However, until the 11th July this year, one rule that was strictly enforced was that those wearing shorts must also wear long, knee-length socks. This applied even to the members of visiting clubs and it is said that one such team had to purchase suitable socks at the golf club before being permitted to play.
Now though, on what I think is likely to be known as 'Black Friday' in the annals of the club, all that was changed. The ruling committee decided that short socks will permitted but, presumably as a sop to the traditionalists, they must be white and ankles must still be decently covered.
Where will it all end one wonders? Bare, unwashed feet in battered sandals? grubby T-shirts with rude messages printed on them? Baseball caps worn back to front? The floodgates are open!
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Knife Crime
Were there four, five, six or seven fatalities from knife crime in just one day a week or so ago? All four figures were proclaimed in newspaper headlines or tv news bulletins. Even just one would have been one too many.
Politicians and newspaper pundits are keen to put forward their own remedies for the situation. An automatic five years in gaol for anyone carrying a knife; shock knife carriers by taking them to see victims of knife crime in their hospital beds (I wonder what the victims think of that idea?), punish the parents, give schools further rights to search their pupils. I warmed to the suggestion from a voluntary social worker that the remedy was not to be found in the perpetrators' schools but in their homes.
Some politicians and tabloid leader writers are convinced that most of the troubles of our society today have their origin in the 'swinging 60s' when a very vocal minority rebelled against convention and established authority. I feel that the spirit of the avaricious eighties was even more to blame. That was the decade in which we were urged to abandon our faith, whether it was one that was expressed in attendance on Sundays in Church, Chapel or Meeting House or a secular faith in the eventual achievement by political means of a material earthly paradise in which there would be universal brotherhood with no poverty and no class distinction, and in which peace would reign for ever and ever.
Over a century earlier Edward Fitzgerald had expressed that idea eloquently in his translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam:
Alike for those who for 'the day' prepare
And those who unto a 'tomorrow' stare,
The Muezzin from the tower of darkness cries,
'Fools, your reward is neither here nor there!
The zeitgeist, the spirit of the '80s, assured us that hoping for a heaven beyond the grave and working towards the idea of an earthly paradise were equally fruitless exercises.
Darwin, and common sense, assured us that life was a struggle in which the strong survived and the weak went under. There was no such thing as 'Society'. It was up to all of us to stand on our own feet and seize for ourselves and our families our share of the world's wealth. There was no purpose in life beyond the gratification of the senses, personal survival, the survival of the species, and the creation of the wealth that ensured that survival.
We were by then sufficiently remote from the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps to have forgotten that fundamentalist Darwinism of this kind had been the justification for their existence. It was the manifest destiny of the world's 'superior races' to subjugate and eventually exterminate 'inferior' ones. The policies of the Nazis were, so many of them genuinely believed, helping along the inexorable progress of evolution.
We, in the '80s and '90s did our best to make the most of the materialist environment (sometimes referred to admiringly as 'the real world') in which we were assured we were living. Whereas in the past just one partner in every marriage had been the principal breadwinner and the other the home-maker, both were now encouraged to go out and work, to acquire that wealth that was our reason for existence. Women were liberated from the drudgery of the kitchen and the wash-tub to enjoy the freedom of wage-slavery instead.
The forces of nature dictated that women had to desist from gainful employment while actually having babies and for a month or two afterwards. However, just as soon as was humanly possible, babies were passed on to the care of nurseries, kindergartens, and schools so that their mothers could return to their supermarket check-outs, their lathes and their word processors to get on with their real task of 'wealth creation'.
When I returned home from school in the benighted '20s and '30s, my mother was always there to welcome me, to ask about my day at school, to give me my meal, and encourage me to get on with my homework. When Dad got home from work he always had at least a little time and energy for me. My two sons had the same experience. In the '50s and '60s many women carried on at work until their first baby was born, but then decided that homemaking and childrearing was a satisfying and full-time job.
How many children these days come home to an empty house? When Mum and Dad do get back from work they're too tired, too busy and too preoccupied with the events of the day to take any real interest in their children. Occasionally they feel that they deserve a little relaxation and go out for the evening, leaving the children with the latch-key, a video and a games console.
If children don't receive the interest, friendship and attention for which they crave at home, they'll go out for it and find it among their mates 'in a gang'. Eventually their gang will be threatened by another gang. Someone will suggest that it would be a good idea to carry knives 'for protection'. Thus is knife crime born.
Do I want to put the clock back? Perhaps I do. I have no doubt at all that children are best brought up in a stable home where a parent is always there to welcome them back from school or play. In the past that parent was usually their Mum but I am not so sexist as to believe that men are incapable of fulfilling the role of home-maker and women that of bread-winner.
I know, none better, that there are some circumstances in which that ideal situation just isn't possible. Few families are one-parent from choice. Those circumstances though, should be an exception, an exception that society should do its best to alleviate, rather than shrug its shoulders and 'pass by on the other side'.
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A Personal Footnote
This blog will be posted a little earlier than usual this week. Tomorrow (Friday) morning at about 8.00 a.m., when I would be normally posting it, I expect to be speeding on my way to the Essex County Hospital in Colchester to have a cataract operation performed on my right eye. The left eye was similarly dealt with almost two years ago.
I have already this week had some experience 'in the front line' of today's NHS in action when, last Monday, I went to see a consultant about quite a different matter at the Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford. I hope to share with you my impressions of the two visits in my next blog.
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