How to start the day.

So there I am listening to the radio at 6 in the morning and this is how it goes...

It's six o'clock of Friday the 4th January Good morning this is 'Today' with Evan Davis and James Naughtie.  The headlines this morning;  Labour are proposing that the long term unemployed be guaranteed a job, paid for by cutting tax relief on the pension contributions of the wealthiest.

And the program went on... and on... and on.

How do we do it?  How do we, as a culture, continue with this utter insanity?  That is, in part, a rhetorical question.  We do it by being brutal, unkind and oppressive to our children.  Fundamentally this is how we perpetuate the insanity. When you frighten children into conforming it creates a kind of emotional wound which becomes a callus and forever affects their intellectual interpretation of the world.  I encountered a sublime example of this in a conversation with an elderly woman from what we might like to think is the older generation.  She was complaining that the trouble with young people nowadays ... yada yada yada ...  and that hitting children was a good thing because it helps them remember.  She is a friend of my father and he is getting forgetful in his old age so I mused that perhaps we should hit him as it may help him to remember too.  She snapped back "Don't be stupid;  It only works on children."  It may seem reasonable to dismiss this as stupidity but I am interested in how and why 'we' humans manage to be so overtly and stunningly self contradictory.

It is all about pain.  She was clearly beaten as a child and now believes that that is HOW she survived.  In a perverse kind of way she must imagine that to be kind to children you must hit them.  These politicians spout utter nonsense and they get away with it because the listening public are just as stupid.  You simply cannot guarantee jobs for the unemployed unless there ARE jobs.  But they understand that and so propose to use the collective resources (taxes - and in this case reclaimed illegitimately) to 'create' jobs.  Creating jobs like that will inevitably cost more than to pay someone either a fair wage for a USEFUL job or a totally minimum survival 'benefit'.  In fact it is insulting and a deliberate perversion of the English language to call it a benefit but that is too much detail.  These politicians are incompetent and irrational ... plebs? dare I say it?

Unfortunately they are stupid and they do get an opulent living at the expense of the unfortunate, but slightly nicer, people at the bottom of the pile.  How do we humans continue to tolerate such stupidity?  I noticed, also, that Malala Yousafzai, the probably quite nice, young Pakistani girl was leaving the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham.  Malala, you may recall, was shot by another bunch of 'would be' rulers, the Taliban!  The Taliban claimed they shot Malala in the head - she was only 14 years old - because she was "promoting secularism".  Well HECK you Taliban jerks... if your religion sanctions shooting little girls in the head why would any sane human want you or your effing religion?

Us folks in Britain think we are better than that but we can still carry out the same cruel dynamics; We just disguise it a little better.  Labour are suggesting forcing people to do non-jobs, which will actually cost more than giving them benefits, so that when someone is too ill to do the work they can stop their benefits altogether.  The perverse justification for this is that if they won't work it can be said to be their own fault.  But do any of these politicians wonder what someone might live on if they stop them getting any money at all?  Of course what they know is that it is the most frail, the most damaged and the most ill members of society who will simply die quietly in the slums somewhere and the politicians will get away with it.  People in work will be so afraid they won't object because to do so will put them at risk of the same fate.  So, just like in the German concentration camps that Primo Levi wrote about, the poor will oppress the poor on behalf of the rulers just so that they don't suffer so much.

What possible sense is there in these politicians, and their baying throng, claiming that some people are too lazy to work?  I would like to ask all the people who are collecting benefits if they would like a job.  I think the vast majority would say yes.  But the whole subject is obfuscated by perverting the English language in the first place.  People don't want to do pointless work.  Even the sanctimonious politicians would draw the line at shovelling shit for no purpose except that other people tell them to do it for a pittance.  Nearly all people want to fit into the community and to have a sense of purpose and self worth.  Nearly all want some function in their community.  Our culture runs on the idea of doing a 'job' for money.  People don't want to do a non-job for little or no money.  Oh God why am I wasting all this cyber space.  Anyone who stops to think about it knows full well that a population of people like to work.  If there are enough jobs for all and no one is being paid too little or too much the society functions well.  What we have in this country is a system that is cascading towards some getting stupidly rich and not enough work for the rest of the population.  It is a manufactured crime and it is not so different from the Taliban shooting little girls because they are afraid of them.

David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband (to name just three currently prominent politicians) are all but bearded Taliban who have decided to shave off their beards as a disguise.

There!  That's telling you!

In case you are wondering I hate the sanctimonious, hypocritical, pretentious, greedy, stupid politicians who want to lord it over other people to massage their own egos (and to line their bank accounts with illegitimate money).  And another thing, just before I go, I am now very ill, in part, due to being unemployed for too long!