A sense of proportion, perhaps?
From time to time, it seems to me, events or developments both at home and around the world remind us of the variety and randomness of each individual’s life chances, opportunities and indeed whatever are deemed to be our “human rights”.
In the past week I have seen – on the one hand – media stories about the iniquities of the UK educational system under which the 6% (or is it 7%?) of kids who are “lucky enough” to have been 
privately educated gain better A” level and “GCSE” results than their state-educated counterparts and – on the other – a great deal of coverage being given to the “inner city” state school that, next academic year, will be sending many more of its pupils on to Oxford or Cambridge University than Boris’s alma mater Eton College.
Separately, these days we are quite used to being harangued by “woke” opinion formers about the Government’s failure – despite all its hot air – to do sufficient (or is it anything?) to “level up” those living in the rest of the country with the “fat cat” Tory-supporting toffs who live in the South-East and the London metropolis.
We are regularly reminded statistically by “those in the know” about how many people in the UK are currently having to resort to food banks or other charitable initiatives in order to put enough food on the table to feed their families … how many children and young persons are officially “living in poverty” … and indeed by how far even the Government’s “minimum wage” and/or “living wage” rates of pay are inadequate to enable our disadvantaged, downtrodden poorest in society to live any sort of decent life.
Our airwaves and television screens are also filled with an endless succession of proponents of greater “equal opportunity” queuing up to tell us the extent to which there are not enough BAME, disabled, LGBT (etc. ad infinitum) individuals in the upper echelons of every walk of life, every public service, every commercial and/or public organisation.
All of the above-listed “campaigns” appear to based upon a strange logic which holds that that (if only they were given “an equal start”) every single person in the world would automatically end up as either Prime Minister of their country, or – if they chose – a billionaire business leader, an Olympic 
athlete, a Nobel Prize-winning research scientist, a chart-topping global pop star, a Hollywood movie producer or even the most celebrated and respected naturalist ever to walk the Earth … (and indeed quite possibly several of the above simultaneously).
The way I view the world – as the Gershwin brothers’ famously wrote in the ditty included in their 1935 opera Porgy and Bess – It Ain’t Necessarily So.
And so in the last 72 hours we have watched the extraordinary events unfolding in Afghanistan resulting in the US-dominated “Allies” (twenty-plus years’ of military involvement now behind them) withdrawing hastily – with their tails hanging humiliatingly between their legs – from Kabul Airport, leaving the general Afghan population to their uncertain fate under the yoke of Taliban rule.
I guess that some feminist campaigners might argue that there is (and should be) no inconsistency between continuing their struggle to advance the cause of women in 21st Century Britain and also doing what we can to help Afghan women retain their hard-earned “relative freedoms” gained since the Taliban last held sway throughout Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, people like cynical old me find ourselves thinking not only that women in Britain should be thanking their lucky stars that they live here and not in Afghanistan but also – if there was any justice and logic involved in any of this – they should be switching their campaigning zeal to ensuring that the hard-earned “levelling up” freedoms gained by women in Afghanistan over the past twenty years are not now reversed forever in a matter of weeks.
I’d be interested to know how many UK feminist campaigners vehemently opposed on principle to British military interventions abroad (cue references to Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan et al.) would now happily abandon that position if a British intervention were to be proposed in our recalled Parliament this week specifically to support Afghan women in their current unfortunate hour of need/plight.
