IT’S time for me to stop being a news junkie before I go completely mad. I’m already more or less convinced we’re living through the end days.
Every bizarre weather event, every animal extinction, only convinces me further. And one only has to look at politics in all parliaments to start believing in conspiracy theories. The corruption around coronavirus contracts, the shenanigans within the SNP, the lies told with no shame at all by all shades, all fill my mind with hopeless despair.
But then, these days, to avoid thinking about my own situation, I’ve been doing what I always do, plugging into the world but non-stop. And it is no place to be for light relief, for what would once have been funny no longer is.
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Self-identification would once have been a TV comedy sketch – now it’s a policy which allows bearded men with their bits still intact into girls’ changing rooms. Its exponents abuse women who dare to say, hang on a minute.
Companies and even hospitals agonise over how to describe lactating mothers without referring to women or breastfeeding. Transphobic is applied to anyone criticising this brave new world which leads to cancel culture or utterly vile comments and even threats on social media, too often the home of the cowardly unnamed.
Jobs have been lost, reputations trashed and smashed for stating an opposing view – most of them women who seem to have little say in this redefining of their sex. Sadly, many causing this damage are women themselves, not that they would allow such a narrow definition now that biology itself is questioned.
This week was the turn of the new director general of the BBC, Tim Davie, to get in there with his right-on credentials. He is aiming for 50 per cent of LGBT to be 'out' to their managers, requires 95 per cent of staff to complete the controversial unconscious bias training and 80 per cent to state their social class.
Maybe it’s a generation issue, but I find most of these ideas risible. Women of my age were too busy fighting for actual equality to worry about the needs of sub-groups – fighting for equal pay, the right to have a loan and eventually a mortgage without a male guarantor, the right of the unmarried to leave their pension on death to a dependent relative, the right not to be groped ‘as a laugh’ in the office….I could go on and on.
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Women were not viewed on the same level as men, either intellectually or in human terms. We were deemed inferior from birth by the vast majority of men and many women pandered to that to get their way. It was a great shock when we turned.
And now it’s revenge time; making a mockery of us by allowing anyone to be a woman and then decrying us if we disagree or dare to laugh at the absurdities of men buying tampons, seeking menopausal advice, wanting to experience breast feeding. Are they mad?
At the same time, certain papers publish daily pictures of D-list celebrities exhibiting their ‘peachy’ backsides like monkeys on heat, alongside salacious copy – something we got rid of in the 1970s. Strange timings.
But it’s not just women who are under attack. In our universities, which should be an exciting whirl of stimulating argument and rigorous debate, the students now decide who’s fit and woke enough to speak to them. Opposing views in this batty new world are not permitted and the dons who don’t do their bidding are reported and disappeared.
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All of this at a time when women and men are struggling to feed themselves and maintain some dignity as they stand in soup kitchens, food banks and huddle together for warmth and some form of comfort.
We’ve truly lost our way when abstract ideas are debated before poverty, pandemics, independence.
Lost our way as the world dies all around us and only promises are made as we shrivel along with nature and its animals who are finer creatures than we’ll ever be.
Childish comments are thrown across the English Channel by the Brexit deal-makers now embittered by all they argued for without really thinking what it would mean. Meanwhile businesses go under, the cities are deserted and, maddened by covid, youths dance wildly in the streets when allowed out, lining up, God knows, how many future deaths.
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Apathy and undirected anger are a lethal mix – one I see daily as a news junkie. It’s too simple to say it began with Brexit and the triumphant return of English superiority which always bubbled barely under the surface; too simple to say certain newspapers can be blamed for their rhetoric of hate and racism; too simple to say that the plague has turned us fearful and feral.
But maybe it really is that simple. If it’s not, maybe we don’t deserve to survive.
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