Down, down, down in a burning ring of fire … a ring of fire …
Yep. That’s where I’m going this week. Flame throwers at the ready. You see, for a while I’ve been wanting to say something about Black Lives Matter but I haven’t really known how. This week … well … it’s hot and I’m fed up. The Kessel Run to Sussex took a fuck of a lot more than twelve Parsecs yesterday and some plonker got all aggressive and shitty with me because as a 52 year old bag I have the temerity to drive a sports car and worse, I overtook him. O.M.G. The horror! You’d have thought I’d peppered him with machine gun fire. If I drove a real snurd, I confess it would have been tempting.
Yeh, and to be frank, I probably listened to Never Mind the Bollocks too many times and that’s ANGRY political stuff. And you know me, never one to avoid getting flamed if I can. But yeh, Black Lives Matter (AS WELL) … Here is my incredibly simplistic take on it.
[Rant Mode]
It seems that a lot of us have huge difficulty with being open minded these days. When I meet people for the first time, I confess I find it as tough as anyone to avoid making snap judgements based on their choice of clothes, hair colour, voice and any amount of other irrelevant crap. I suspect we all do. I am beginning to wonder if there is some kind of instinctive tribal thing that makes us all judge by appearances and that humans can’t stop themselves from doing so in the first instance. Perhaps it’s a thing from way back, a pack thing. Maybe. The point is, the part where we become thinking, rational beings is where we set ourselves above that, where we ignore our instincts and broach the difficult task of talking to people we aren’t sure about or are uncomfortable with.
Perhaps it helps if we are not in a bubble. Where I live, people go abroad a lot, people visit from abroad and we walk from a to b to go to the shops, church, the library, etc etc. We are lucky enough to be exposed to many other cultures. If you walk everywhere, you meet people on the street, in shops and around town who are different from you. And when you get the opportunity to talk to them you realise that other people are not black, white, old, young, foreign, scary etc they are actually just … people … well except teenagers, they really are scary (joke sorry teenagers). In this country we are beginning to drive more and walk less and we are beginning to fragment a little into like minded groups.
That’s not bad in one sense, but in others it reinforces stereotypes.
One of the difficulties of all this is that for political parties, there is a great benefit to reinforcing our little bubbles and stereotypes. They want to engender a sense of belonging among their followers; a feeling that all members of party X or Y are PLU (people like us) and that we’re all in this together, working towards a common aim. The unfortunate side effect is the implication that other people following other parties are not like us and don’t belong. It also doesn’t help that some of them gloss over disagreements within their own ranks by pointing the finger at other groups or people who hold a different point of view and blaming everything on them.
This is probably alright in a situation where people are not taking politics too seriously and are still seeing it for what it is, ie, the machinery by which a nation governs itself, as best as it can. But increasingly here in Britain, we seem to be losing that detachment and cynicism for which we are famous.
Even I’m losing it. And I’ve been trying to work out why. After a lot of thinking, here’s my Anne Elk theory.
These days, there are far fewer people of faith. That’s not a problem in itself. However, humans seem to have an inherent need to believe fervently in … something. Without a religion to put our efforts into, it seems a lot of us pour that spiritual fervour into the most ridiculous things, which hair colour brand we use, whether we like tattoos or not, reality TV and, of course, our political affiliations. When you add that need to believe into the mix, suddenly the results of the PLU marketing start to become a bit grim.
Going out on a serious limb here – yeh I can feel the cross hairs lining up as I write – I am beginning to think that the difficulty with some aspects of modern politics is not that people’s political choices are driven by their religion but that their political affiliations ARE their religion. My religion affects everything I do, political choices as well. But my politics are NOT my religion. I think that if you are a Christian and you start believing that a single political party is … you know … God’s party, you are in trouble.
OK so perhaps it also depends where you are. In Britain, where I live, it’s absolutely OK to question authority, rules, politicians, the status quo and everything else, indeed to not do so is considered a bit naive. As a Christian that’s also OK because Jesus did it the whole chuffing time. In some countries it’s rather frowned upon to make fun of politicians, here in Britain, frankly, we think that’s what they’re for.
For me personally what that means is I vote for the party whose policies most closely align with my religious beliefs. My religious beliefs are about doing what I believe is the Right Thing – other people’s interpretation of Right may vary – mine are as follows:
Love your neighbour as yourself.
That which you do to the least of my bretheren, you do to me.
What would Jesus do? (Turning over tables, trashing the place and making a whip from cords and setting about people cannot be ruled out here).
No hatred – ‘if I say I love God and hate my neighbour I am a liar, for if I cannot love my neighbour, who I have seen, how can I love God who I have not seen?’
My job is not judgement, ‘Do not judge others lest you be judged’ and ‘leave judgement to God.’
This means I have chosen who to vote for based on how closely the follow my version of Christian philosophy. As a result I am the original floating voter. I’ve voted Liberal (which means a different thing in the UK to America, think Conservative with a small c). I have also voted, Labour (socialist – relax, my American friends, this is not the socialism in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, that’s communism. Socialism, proper is a different thing based, originally, on Christian love-thy-neighbour kinds of principles, help the poor, welfare state, that kind of stuff, funded by asking the rich to pay a little more tax to help it along). I think I may have voted Conservative once, and I’ve voted for the Green Party. It just depends which one is suggesting policies that most closely resemble ‘the right thing’ (as outlined in my points above) at the time.
This also means that I do not believe in ‘them’ and ‘us’ but ‘we’. This appears to get me in the shit with pretty much everyone, which is unfortunate, but there we go. What do I mean by that. I mean completely disregarding how people look and honing in on who they are.
I think the greatest example of that I’ve encountered recently is a lady called Irene.
Every weekday morning at roughly 9.15, on the radio show I listen to, they have this thing called, Pause for Thought. They have someone of faith on who gives a little pep talk. They are from all faiths, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Humanist etc and are usually brilliant. Last week, they had this lovely guy on from ooop north somewhere who is a vicar in the Church of England – that’s basically episcopalian for everyone everywhere else in the world. I can’t remember his name but he was talking about modern answers to the question, ‘who is my neighbour’. JC’s answer was the parable of the Good Samaritan, obviously. This guy told us about Irene.
Irene is a stalwart of his church. A lovely lady who is always on hand to help, listen, make cakes – and tea – and generally muck in. I think she may even have been a lay reader or church warden but I can’t remember. One Sunday, she said goodbye to everyone as they were all drinking coffee after the service and went off home. A few minutes later she was found lying on the pavement just outside in a state of disarray, her sticks beside her. Someone had hauled her out of her car onto the street and driven off in it.
The young gentleman concerned was apprehended by the police, convicted and went to gaol.
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Irene would spell it neighbour but beggars can’t be choosers. 
