Reflections on a sunny day
Maybe it’s because I’ve got too much time on my hands during the lockdown but I’m beginning to get irritated by both aspects of the coverage of the current crisis and some of the ironies about the world that the UK experience has highlighted.
Let me give some examples.
Arguably, because of the infinite differences in the way human beings live upon our planet, almost by definition nothing in the human condition is perfect. I’m talking systems of government, traditions, cultures, pastimes, attitudes, compassion for others (or perhaps lack of it) and the way we all choose to live our lives.
If the world was perfect, of course, we would all be free to choose how we want to live and could then do so, without affecting the quiet enjoyment of other people’s existence. But the world isn’t perfect and – just as one man’s meat is another’s poison – one man’s freedom to live how he wants inevitably infringes upon someone else’s ditto.
By the nature of things, there all always going to be idiots, warped individuals, strident ‘holier than thou’ groups and those who – for whatever reason – see no reason (or choose not) to live by the rules that various human societies devise for themselves in order to provide the greatest good and freedom for the greatest number.
Overnight we learn that the UK is doing pretty well compared to other countries regarding observance of its own lockdown rules – see here for a piece by Ben Spencer, medical correspondent, that appears today upon the website of the – DAILY MAIL
So 90% of us are generally observing the rules – well done, chaps!
But what this also tells me is that 10% of the UK population (in other words 6.65 million people, according to the latest figures I’ve seen) are not.
Let’s repeat that: six and a half million UK citizens are routinely ignoring the rules devised in order to save lives – either whenever it suits them, or completely – presumably because they are too thick, stupid, self-centred-and-interested, uncaring, irresponsible or thoughtless to do otherwise).
Let’s throw in an irony or two at this point.
Overnight the media has been running a story that British universities have applied to the Government for a minimum £2 billion bail out because of fears that their income from overseas students (especially from China) will be lost, thus jeopardising their income and financial well being.
See here for a report by Jack Grove as appears upon the website of the – TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION
This is the same national higher education sector that, when university fees were first introduced by the (then Labour) UK Government in 1998 – set with a ceiling, originally intended exclusively for the “best of the best” universities, at £9,000 per annum – almost as one immediately every university with pretensions to excellence set their fees at £9,000, no doubt in the hope or expectation that this would result in tsunamis of cash flowing into their coffers.
Let nobody imagine that the fact that senior academic salaries subsequently soared skywards was not connected to this development.
By 2019 we learned that over 50% of UK university vice-chancellors were now paying themselves in excess of £300,000 per annum and at least six were trousering in excess of £500,000!
Funny that …
One trouble with human beings is their capacity to ‘get used to what they get used to’ – and that includes the finer things in life and/or ‘living high on the hog’ (to coin a phrase) when events conspire to bring such advantages to their doors.
And then, of course – as night follows day – the prospect that at some point these lovely things might be taken, or wither, away and potentially thereafter be denied to those who have gained them – through their own brilliance and hard graft(?) – is not regarded as a win. Not by those people anyway.
In that sense, our universities’ great and good are no different from the fat cat capitalists in the City and elsewhere who ‘create money out of nothing’ and/or build up highly lucrative businesses and reap the rewards thereof – and who suddenly, because of market conditions and/or global pandemics – find themselves at the whim of ‘The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ [Shakespeare – Hamlet, Act III Scene 1] – and also seek bail outs.
The fact is that human existence is a giant game of Snakes And Ladders. What goes up may later come down – and vice versa. It’s inconvenient, of course, but hell – “stuff happens”.
It’s no different with the bigger things in this place. The 21st Century human world as it stood until the back end of 2019 just thundered on down its track – okay with occasional lip service to existential threats like Climate Change and the out-of-control increase in human population – but in general happy delusion that the world as we all knew it would endure forever.
It’s taken this Coronavirus crisis to give us all a heavy tug on the reins.
Another aspect of the variety of humanity that makes me shake my head is the regularity with which the whacky, deluded and misguided among us develop the inclination to invade our airwaves on phone-in and similar programmes to give us the benefit of their views.
Twice in the last three days, listening to BBC radio stations, I have been involuntary subjected to the views of ladies who have rung in, ostensibly to discuss the Coronavirus pandemic in one form or another … and then suddenly branched out to rant that our urgent (not to say “all hands to the pumps desperate”) national response to the crisis it is deflecting the NHS’s attention from a far greater problem: the fact that the UK has on its statute books laws permitting abortions.
As I understand it the UK has permitted these for 53 years, ever since the 1967 Abortion Act. You’d have thought by now that this particular argument/discussion had been settled once and for all.
Clearly not so for some.
It’s not that I object to the view of those who are anti-abortion per se, whether their reasons be religion-based or otherwise. It’s just that I would have thought – in the middle of what we’re going through at the moment – that we’d all be concentrating upon the matter at hand, not using it to try re-heat old issues which in some quarters will never go away.
