How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

by James O'Brien

There is a deep desire to believe that Muslims, like Jews and people of colour before them, are somehow predisposed to commit certain offences. It is a hatred as ancient as humanity itself but I never cease to be surprised by how many people don’t see that they have been thoroughly caught in its clutches.

people had been groomed to see a vote to leave as a vote to somehow reduce the number of foreigners in their midst.

It genuinely never occurred to us that the most central platform of Brexit rhetoric – that freedom of movement was utterly untrammelled and uncontrollable – was demonstrably untrue.

the hate is actually more about the hater than the hated,

Some of this escalating of tensions is deliberate. For example, pretending not to understand that the Black Lives Matter movement seeks a society where black lives matter to law enforcement officers as much as white lives do.

if we’ve learned anything over the last few years, it’s that progress we once naively believed to be permanent can be easily undone.

Until the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, fathers and husbands in the UK were routinely required to act as guarantors for women seeking mortgages or credit agreements.

It was not until 1973, for example, that Ireland lifted a ban on married women having jobs (except teaching).

Think about what ‘normal’ behaviour is. Once, it was normal to see doctors advertising cigarettes, to own slaves, to be free to rape your wife. Actually, you couldn’t technically rape your wife in the UK until as recently as 1984, when the Criminal Review Committee rejected the idea that ‘marital rape’ could be a crime.

There are several generations of potential pensioners coming down the tracks who will have nothing to show for their entire working lives. They will conceivably have paid enough rent to pay off two or three mortgages on behalf of their landlords, but will own precisely nothing.

With neither capital nor security on the horizon, they are working simply to survive.

Take an angry person, tell them you feel their pain, give them a target for their anger and help them to switch off their brain. It’s not complicated.

Imagine, for a moment, what an undiluted diet of news portraying Muslims as terrorists, Mexicans as rapists, black people as criminals and feminists as metaphorical castrators would do to you.