What Happened to Us?

What happened to us?



Have you noticed how society seems to have become a bit of a mess lately? I see evidence of this everywhere I look. Have we really lost our direction? At the end of this article you can reach your judgement as to whether I am simply a grumpy old man, well not in the first bloom of youth, or someone who is saying what you are thinking.

Apart from struggling for my daily commercial life I also do some lecturing and pursue some other academic pursuits. This takes me to a variety of Further and Higher Education establishments. Sadly I have to report that most of the young adults swear most of the time and you are considered strange if you ask them to stop, which I do.

Many of the young men spit on the floor and when I told one of them to stop he simply couldn't understand why and instantly tried aggressive behaviour as his default position.

I also insist that the young men and women do not slouch with their feet on the empty chairs or listen to their MP3 players or take phone calls during lessons. They look at me as if I am deranged and I have had to eject a couple of them because they simply refused to live with this rule. Yesterday a young man appeared 45 minutes late for a one-hour lecture and couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t allow him entry.

However this is not just a story aimed at the more moronic of our young. We have a Government that lies and when discovered who does not apologise but justifies. This is about people who are supposed to know better.

Recently we, in the UK, have been barraged with a variety of different numbers of foreigners admitted to work legally. Don’t get me wrong I have nothing against those of foreign origin, my grandparents included!

I’m not so much worried about the foreigners as I am about the liars running our lives, our Government. This is not a political argument, this is about morality.

It is worrying that there are wildly varying numbers of illegal aliens we're told who are living among us. Surely if we know how many this is, we would know who they are and where they live and could simply kick them out.

This reminds me of my headmaster of many decades ago asking me "where did you lose your cap Klinger?" For me to respond, aged 11, but clearly brighter than him, "if I knew where I'd lost it sir it would be on my head."

The facts are that our Government lost all control of this situation and has since sought to obscure this from the public. Years ago the Klinger family lived in California, and they had similar problems, albeit their largest number of illegal aliens were from Central and South America. They seemed to have a more enlightened approach to the same problem. Every so often they had an amnesty to regularise the situation. That way at a given moment in time you knew how many people there were and what resources you needed to plan for. Anyone there, making a contribution to society at that moment in time, was allowed to stay, and rendered legal. This was a tremendous benefit to both the previously illegal and to the society in which they lived. It also stopped the lying and cheating and back room bullyboy tactics of those who take advantage of the weak and the oppressed.
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Unfortunately, for short-term political reasons, we also have many politicians of every hue who are at ease with a more relaxed version of the truth. Yes, liars.

In the last weeks we have had the most senior police officer in the country hear his department roundly condemned by an official enquiry and he did not resign. We have had a junior minister who called for more severe punishments for those using their mobile telephone whilst driving caught by the police using his mobile telephone whilst he was driving, and he did not resign. We had two senior ministers of our Government tell us figures for immigration that they changed (upwards) on the same day, and again, upwards, the following morning; and neither of them resigned.

It isn’t that long ago that the British system was honour driven. If you were caught doing wrong, or failing to live up to your public duty, you resigned. It was stoic and a very good idea. The whole world looked with envy on our incorruptible civil service bureaucracy, it was all that was best about our country. Honest, efficient, and above suspicion. Of course no system was, or can be one hundred percent perfect, but it can aim for it. We seem to have given up on this, and to be prepared to accept lies, half-truths and spin; and we’re all the worse for it.

In the same vein we have the ever-present debate about climate change. It is an obsession that knows no limit. With every passing day we have further legislation and threats of draconian rules and regulations to enforce eco friendly behaviour. The big new “right on” behaviour is for us to purchase carbon offsets so that we can mitigate the damage we're supposedly doing to our planet. No one has justified this to me as yet. There are people who are gaining from this, and they are businessmen with a vested interest. Just like no one except local and national government will gain from taxing our rubbish collections. However, because these actions are being taken in the name of protecting the planet no one dares even raise a question mark. Instead we are told we must make these and many other alterations to our behaviour to stop our imminent demise.

So I must sort my rubbish while over 20% of the planet’s energy is burnt on the freeways of California, and 2 new fossil fuel power stations a week are being built in China?

I, for one, recognise climate change when I see it, but also recognize that there has always been climate change and always will be. Now the politically correct guardians of the gates of moral right and certainty are convinced that they know the cause, the effect and the cure. They don't and most scientists know this but still stood applauding when Al Gore received a Nobel Prize for his very iffy documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" which a British court recently found was wrong on at least 9 major counts. Should we simply re-name the
film, "An Inconvenient Opinion"?

I have simply had enough of the thought police now patrolling the corridors of our local and national government nanny state who tell us what to eat and drink, how much to exercise and how to look after our children. They are seeking to run every aspect of our lives in a realisation of an Orwellian nightmare. It is long past time we spoke up.

The reasons why this is all so important are not quite so obvious. I truly believe that we are allowing all the ingredients for a totalitarian state to be put in place without too much thought and virtually no protest. We all understood when some of the tougher laws were introduced they were created to deal with the ongoing terrorist threat. But we have to be extremely careful not to become a totalitarian state whilst protecting our democracy.

Of course while we have a basically decent and well-intentioned, paternalistic and democratic leadership in place we can all sleep safely in our bed. Heaven forbid, through any kind of national emergency and we find ourselves in the hands of someone less benevolent we could be living in a dictatorship.

The increasingly strident rules and laws already make for a less civilised and pleasant place for us all to live in. You can measure the downward spiral of a society by its use of euphemism. When words lose their power and we avoid difficult truths we are in danger of not waking up before it is too late. I am not saying that many of these new laws and regulations have been thought up with evil in mind. No, I firmly believe that the people doing this were well intentioned, but deluded. It is not the job of our political leaders to rule on our lifestyles. That is the job of every individual, for you and me, for our moral conventions. Our religion, our spirituality, our traditions, our evolution to a chosen path, these are the guides to live by. Not the political theorists in the Town Hall. With all the laws and regulations coming into force in our country we are in grave danger. Wake up and be afraid, be very afraid.