Tuesday 14 January 2014

Grow A Pair

Sometimes, the amount of stupid in the world makes my brain bleed. Take David Milliband for example, and his declaration that the middle class are in crisis. Thing is, we're actually not. To call it a crisis would be to misunderstand what the word even means. So I may be less affluent, and my pension worth less, and I may even have to work a bit longer. I am, at worst, inconvenienced. Crisis is about being hungry, homeless, lonely and in poor health. Crisis is something dire and frightening. Crisis is not simply having less than you may have had before. When I hear people in authority belch out such sewage it alarms me. Where is the common sense, the honest candour, the methodical evaluation of evidence? Does everything have to be reducible to petty political points scoring and Kleenex grade soundbites? Apparently yes. So let me make a suggestion. Let's recognise how fortunate we are. Let's not assume that we are somehow deserving of some pre ordained standard of living. We're not. We never were. More than that, let's be just a bit grateful that we weren't born in the Sudan, or forced to live according to some bronze age religious creed. Despite having a little less we continue to enjoy levels of affluence and liberty alien to those born a generation or two before. And I fear that we have become so soft, so expectant and so belicose that we render ourselves unable to cope should a real trauma arrive. Once upon a time we British would have baulked at using words such as crisis with such feeble minded ease. We would have deemed such bleeting as absurd. Perhaps we should embrace a similar lack of tolerance towards those who speak so glibly, so weakly, and with such disregard for the meaning of real words. People of Great Britain, stand up, get a grip, and quite frankly grow a pair.

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