Week 45 2012

Tendring Topic.......on Line

Some Real Horror Stories!

Hurricane ‘Sandy’

          When publishing my one successful work of fiction (a ‘horror’ story!) as my blog last week I wrote that there was more than enough real horror in today’s world without my adding to it from my imagination!  Events have certainly proved me right.  In the past, when there have been official warnings of doom and disaster to come, the reality has often turned out to be something of an anticlimax.   The flooding of New Orleans in 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was something of an exception.  Its appalling effects were restricted in area though and they were made worse by the lack of effective leadership by US President Bush.

            Hurricane Sandy that struck the USA just a week ago, was most certainly an exception. It was far worse than had been expected by the experts – and their expectations had been pretty dire!   An area of the north-eastern USA larger than the whole of Europe, reaching up to and beyond the Canadian border, was affected.  Millions of homes were damaged and/or had their electricity supply cut off, and hundreds of thousands of people rendered at least temporarily homeless. The centre of New York City and other towns on the Atlantic coast were flooded by a tidal surge made even worse by hurricane strength winds and torrential rain, trees were brought down, public and private buildings alike were wrecked.  Heavy unseasonal snowfall compounded the misery in northern parts of the affected area. It has been estimated the cost of the damage will run to tens of billions of dollars.

            Loss of life was mercifully low, probably less than 100 victims, largely due to the dire warnings, backed by President Obama personally, and sound advice given over and over again on radio and tv.  It will surely be weeks though before life gets back to any semblance of normality for thousands of people.  No electric power means that there are no lifts (I think the Americans call them ‘elevators’). Imagine the plight of someone like myself, with very limited mobility, marooned indefinitely in an apartment on an upper floor of a skyscraper! 

            We have become accustomed to similar disasters (though on a smaller scale) in central America, the Caribbean, the Indian Subcontinent and south-east Asia – but not in an area that many see as representing the very highest standard of living that modern civilisation has to offer!

            Despite the tremendous achievements of mankind in the past two centuries and the phenomenal progress of our scientific knowledge and understanding of the forces of nature, Hurricane Sandy reveals humankind as impotent and powerless when those forces are ranged against us.

            Was Hurricane Sandy, and the other extreme examples of drought, storm and flood that we are now experiencing every year, even in our own country, the result of global climatic change, global warming?  I firmly believe that they were and I believe furthermore that these changes are being brought about, or at least made worse, by human activity. 

            If these increasingly frequent catastrophes can finally persuade the climate-change deniers (including our Clacton-on-Sea M.P.!) of the reality of world climatic change, and the need for urgent action to counter its effects to take priority over all other national and international concerns, then those world-wide who have suffered from them will not have done so in vain.

A Horror closer to Home!

            Much closer to home are the still-developing ramifications of the scandal concerning the late Jimmy Savile. There now seems little doubt that this almost universally popular tv personality, honoured by the Queen and the Pope for his fund-raising and practical service to hospitals and for charitable causes was, in fact, for many years a predatory paedophile, corrupting and contaminating other people as he pursued his pernicious activities.

            Who knew what, and when, and what if anything did they do about it? This is the subject of police investigation, and of internal investigations within the BBC, famous hospitals, and other honoured and respected institutions.  Other celebrities from the ‘pop’ world and the world of politics are being investigated.  As I write two other arrests have been made and more are anticipated.

         

          I hope that Jimmy Savile’s victims, especially those who summoned up the courage to complain but had their complaints ignored or discounted, will find satisfaction in the final outcome of all the current probing.  One regrettable result of the scandal has been to make it possible for rubbishy publications like the Sun, the flagship of the remaining Murdoch Media Empire, to pour scorn on the BBC, an all-British institution of which most of us want to be proud. However the BBC has weathered storms before and I have no doubt that it will, in the end, weather this one.

            Another sad effect is the way in which it will deepen the atmosphere of suspicion with which adult males are regarded when in the company of the young.  Like many old people I find myself attracted to young children.  I like to hear their happy and spontaneous laughter.   It is a joy to see them happily at play.  Yet nowadays I would hesitate to watch children at play on the beach or at a public playground for more than two or three minutes.  I would be afraid of a plain clothes police officer arriving and inviting me to step down to the nearest Police Station and answer a few questions!  

            The Jimmy Savile affair also illustrates how very difficult it can be to pursue resolutely and disinterestedly, an allegation of criminality made against a well-loved celebrity.  In the USA many people believe that such a celebrity may have literally ‘got away with murder’ when, despite overwhelming evidence, a jury acquitted him.

            We hope that couldn’t possibly happen in the UK, but we have seen celebrities acquitted of fraudulent tax evasion by persuading a judge and jury either that they were too other-worldly to have thought about sordid financial matters, or that in all matters other than the narrow one that made their fortunes, they have ‘severe learning difficulties’    Funny thing – one never hears of celebrities being so other-worldly or so dim-witted as to unintentionally pay the Inland Revenue a million or so more than they owe!

Government policies promise horrors yet to come.

-  In the field of ‘Defence’

I don’t think that one needs to be a member of CND or a supporter of the Peace Movement, to believe that devoting another few million pounds to the continued use of those totally useless Trident submarines – while leaving the UK without an aircraft carrier and cutting down the conventional forces that still have unfinished (and never to be finished) business in Afghanistan, is an act of utmost folly.

             Foreign Secretary Hague keeps making bellicose noises against the government of Syria and the Prime Minister is sending war planes to the Middle East to threaten Iran!  Yet Cameron & Co have systematically run down the conventional armed forces that could have backed their bluster while finding millions to support a ‘deterrent’ that we have had for years, that has not as yet deterred anyone and that, if it were ever to be used, would inevitably result in an incalculable number of deaths and the end of civilisation on this planet; Mutually Assured Destruction or M.A.D. (mad indeed!)

- In the field of Planning and Building

The government has decreed that, in order to give a boost to the building industry, create more jobs and provide much-needed homes, the planning laws are to be relaxed.  There is to be a presumption of acceptance of developers’ plans and planning permission will no longer be required for building extensions to homes or structures in back gardens.          

 Building Regulations are also to be relaxed, including those relating to fire precautions and to disabled access.  This is described as cutting through pettifogging red tape and allowing the wealth-creating entrepreneurs to get on with their task of creating wealth for themselves and, purely incidentally and if circumstances permit, serving the needs of the public.

What it will do is create ready-made slums of jerry-built badly insulated buildings, subject to fire risk and threat of flooding, and inaccessible to wheelchair users (so much for the new deal for the disabled that was supposed to be a legacy of the Paralympics!)  It is a step towards making Britain a land of slums comparable with those of the Britain of Victorian times, and of many Asian and South American cities today, and with run-down trailer parks for drifters and missfits on their outskirts, like many cities of the USA.

Add to this either departure from the European Union or ‘repatriation’ of health, safety and labour protection laws ‘imposed by Brussels’, and we’ll have a developers’ paradise and a  positive move towards making the UK ‘competitive in the Global Market’.   Shame about the poor – but David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ will surely see to it that there are sufficient soup runs, food banks and charity handouts, to make sure that very few of them will actually starve or freeze to death.

The American Presidential Election

I am very pleased that Barak Obama won the American Presidential Election.  I am sure that that is good news for both the USA and the rest of the world.

However I have had first the radio and then tv switched on to BBC programmes from 5.00 am till 7.30 am (with a half-hour break for wash, shave and shower) and have heard nothing else.  Surely that can't be all that happened in the world and, in particular, on this side of the Atlantic, in the past twenty-four hours!