Sometimes it’s enough to drive you mad

As I begin today’s post I feel I need to declare the warning/caveat or interest that I’m not quite sure where it’s going to be going.

Actually no – let me put that another way: I know roughly where I’m starting from but at this stage have no idea where I’m going to end up.

I guess you could say that at least that’s better than the thing I most often get accused of these days by people under the age of fifty, i.e. that my memory is fading fast and that increasingly all the evidence points to the fact that I cannot remember what I did or said yesterday, never mind the day before that!

Sometimes it’s difficult to be inclusive and diverse, especially when your raison d’être is to reflect (or is it represent?) the views and interests of a particular group in society, as is our brief on the Rust.

Arguably – in carrying out our mission – our bounden duty is to pay zero attention to the modern obsession with political correctness and simply cover issues from our own (age-related perspective) and ‘hang the consequences’, frankly.

However, that’s not my jumping-off point today.

It’s the notion that in 2018 the world has reached the stage where the internet age has knocked the world as it used to be for six.

You’ve got major national and international retail businesses reviewing whether they need stores at all when, via online purchasing and sub-contracted distribution methods, we can all spot something we covet and have it delivered to our front doors the next day.

We’ve got ‘traditional media’ like newspapers and TV stations regurgitating popular ‘viral’ internet-grown social media stories just hours later, and vice versa.

Any crackpot motor-mouth with the gift of the gab can get their views on any subject under the sun ‘out there’ and have them treated as seriously as those of learned professors with thirty years’ worth of research in the field behind them.

Some might say “What’s not to like?”

Others “That’s how things are these days, get over it …”.

For me, part of the problem is that – when anybody can say anything – and there’s no automatic ‘quality’ or ‘worthiness’ filter operating upon what’s being promulgated, the average person on the proverbial Clapham omnibus (still less the average sixty-something sitting at home, fiddling about on his computer) has fewer and fewer reference points by which to judge the snowstorm of views, opinions and even ‘fake news’ being shunted out.

It’s also the case, it seems to me, that it’s increasingly impossible to reach a considered view upon movements or campaigns promoting things which ordinarily in the past might have been generally considered ‘positive advancements’.

Take women’s equality and/or racial diversity, for example.

Most of us might be vaguely supportive of the idea of ‘equal opportunity’ but when it comes to the female variety, there are some women who are broadly happy with the concept but would leave it at that; others who want to press on further in the direction of introducing forms of positive discrimination in order to ‘correct’ the ingrained attitudes that might tend to ‘socialise’ young girls into believing that (for example) specific careers are more suited to men than women; and finally there are others who seem intent upon nothing less than skewing the world as it is – by giving women special help to ‘have it all’ (i.e. a normal family life simultaneously with allowing them to pursue full-time jobs/careers) as if somehow anything that holds back women from being able to enjoy everything that men can … whilst also, of course, immersing themselves in everything than only women can do, e.g. getting pregnant and having babies … should be erased from human society – on the basis that it is unfair.

At some point in the last 72 hours, on ITV’s Good Morning Britain show being hosted by Piers Morgan, there was a segment in which two ‘campaigning’ black guests held forth on the Royal Wedding [I’d provide a link to the piece if there was one but there doesn’t seem to be any available].

One was a lady who had attended the event in some form or another – she was broadly delighted with the ‘diverse’ elements that had been incorporated into the church service, taking the view that this was a positive step forward, notwithstanding the fact there was still plenty more to accomplish.

The other was a youngish (from my perspective as a white male oldie) articulate male academic – well-mannered, easy-going – but possessed of the conviction that British society – starting from the Royal Family downwards right to its gutters – was an antiquated, irredeemably racist, colonialist carbuncle upon the face of human society as it ought to be.

He objected to the Royal Family and all it stood for – including 1,000 years of history and tradition – on sheer principle. His sense of hurt, injustice, resentment – even victim entitlement – was overpowering and (I have to be honest) to me increasingly offensive the longer he banged on about it.

And anyway, as for ‘diversity’, he said (dribbling with sarcasm), Meghan wasn’t really black, she was just black-lite and deliberately chosen to fit in with mainstream Britain sensitivities. She called herself a feminist – but what could she possibly know about feminism, she’d just married a prince? [and so on …]

The way he told it – or so it seemed –  blacks (or should that be ‘ethnic minorities?) would be ruling the world but for being held back and oppressed by arrogant white empire-building Western Society oppressors.

Nothing but the removal from the Earth of everything that has ever contributed anything to make Britain what it is today – starting with the Royal Family but after that you name it – would suffice.

It was the sort of attitude seemingly custom-designed to prompt even the most liberally-minded among us to find our thoughts drifting to vaguely UKIP-supportive positions (well, if UKIP hadn’t already done the decent thing and self-destructed, that is).

I’m currently armpit-deep in a programme of researching the Normandy Landings campaign of 1944 in advance of my first-ever WW2 battlefield group expedition in July.

What comes home to me time and again in every book I’ve been reading, every documentary I’ve viewed on YouTube and everything I’ve ever learned on the subject are two things: the extraordinarily extreme and bloody nature of war and the fantastic national spirit of togetherness (in both military and civilians) that being under threat of annihilation generates.

Only yesterday I was reading of a US unit that landed amidst the carnage of Omaha Beach (where 2,500 Americans died) on D-Day itself, spent six hours stuck there and lost over 100 of its 150 men before lunchtime.

Of a young factory girl in the Midlands, winner of a sweepstake prize on which date D-Day would happen that was bigger than her weekly wage, who immediately donated it to a military charity. And of a 16 year old girl with only basic first aid skills who volunteered when an appeal went out for nursing staff to help with the casualties (both Allied and German) coming back from Normandy and was thrust into dealing with horrendous scenes of amputation, burns victims, shell-shock and disfigurement – and just got on with it.

Those vignettes affected me yesterday, more than seventy years safely on.

So you’ll have to forgive me for reacting to the aforementioned black academic slagging off everything that made Britain what it is from his comfy seat in the Good Morning Britain show studio with something approaching contempt.

Nobody with a heart could object to the ‘tired, poor, huddled masses’ of the world coming to our shores, as and when they can, to benefit from whatever Britain has to offer.

But to have the opportunity do so is a privilege. And with privileges comes responsibility.

For those who embrace life in Britain and everything it stands for – a huge, enthusiastic welcome from me.

But for those who come here and enjoy everything (materialistic and otherwise) on offer but then refuse to ‘join in’ but apparently prefer to live in their own little worlds forever and deliberately turn their backs on and/or criticise British traditions – especially when our ‘open’ society allows them ready opportunities for them to mouth off that would probably get them detained or worse in the very countries from which ‘their own little worlds’ originate – I’m afraid I cannot help it, I verge towards the attitude “Look, if you hate Britain so much, why don’t you piss off to some country or continent where things are clearly more to your taste … and leave us alone to go our own way?”