the tunnel

I don’t cover the news

because everybody else does.  And I have become very aware of that over the last few weeks of annalog.  I search for the positive, I won’t pretend about it but I like to offer it wherever I can.  What can I add to the debate on Trump and Joe Biden ?   Putin ?   Netanyahu ?  Do I have anything new to say about Ukraine, or Congo, or whatever has gone wrong inside the NHS, various police forces , the rail unions or any of the other daily mushrooming industrial disputes ?   (NB: anything missed off this list is because of its length, not lack of interest)

Now I start out to watch

and whenever I do, I see a similarly shaped programme which involves  hitting me round the head with the headline story  –  15 or 20 minutes,  the talking heads or so called experts, reporters on site, more studio commentary ….  And then bad news. Maltreatment of  women in maternity care, a child run down, a boy stabbed, a man knocked of his motorbike, this wrong in schools, that wrong in prisons.  

There is a great deal wrong in the country,

whether your country is particular or what we used to call the United Kingdom.   Some of this is newly discovered but most of it has taken years to get to the mess it’s in and there is no sense of things being addressed or resolved.    So I am not at all surprised that anxiety and depression balloon, that the figures for child abuse are up and so on and on – I’ll spare you the list.  It isn’t cheerful.

What is going on affects us all or if it doesn’t affect us momentarily, we tend to thank heaven and talk about something else.  I know people and I am sure you do too who have given up on the news.  Phil  doesn’t buy newspapers, dislikes them for all sorts of reasons and says they just contribute to the recycling problems.   Pam the Painter uses a news app but often mentions something it doesn’t include or includes in such abbreviation that she can’t quite grasp what is going on.  Wal says he’s not interested but he is interested in what interests him, via tv or radio. He’ll pick up on this point or that and his response varies in one important way. He will say “I don’t know.”  He will even add “and it is of no interest to me” though if you push him, you often get a thoughtful comment.

There are papers I dislike, just as there are books and television productions which are not my taste.  It is about tone.  There are always people who have wonderful careers, whether in news or comedy  and I wonder why?   Careers seem to be built on what everybody else can admire or get on with.   We says “everybody’s different”   but the numbers of people who don’t differ make up enormous manipulable blocks, whether listening to the unfortunately named Daily Global or taking broad spectrum antibiotics.   This is the age of mass

by Brian Jungen

and there is nothing religious about it.

We seem to have stopped talking about numbers.   We have given up.  People go on having three to five children without apparent consideration of what is open to them in the future.   From warming to boiling in global terms, what future ?

Behind the endlessly repeated phrases (and that repetition makes for turn off in every sense) there is  real fear and the crossover from fear into rage is venerable and well documented..  The tunnel we’re in is long and dark with few lights to break the gloom.    

Party politics was always a fight and there were always those who believed one thing and those who believed another.  Now increasingly you hear disillusion –“ they’re all as bad as each other” – which is the beginning of disaffection which leads to not voting which means the country is run by a smaller number – those who did vote – and that opens the door to extremism and the end of our cherished if mocked balance.

We’re in a tunnel.  Our only hope is that eventually we emerge from it, into the air.