Vocal Voices

Just wondering. Recently we have had the first anniversary of the Grenfell fire, very heavily covered on the TV. The other day locally we had the second anniversary of Jo Cox's murder. Then the first anniversary of the Finsbury Park mosque attack and also recently the anniversary of the Manchester Arena bombing, with people crying on each others shoulders.

Is it getting a bit much? What use is poking at raw memories doing? Are we always going to be having a diet of politicians addressing mournful crowds (and trying hard to look noble as they do so) endlessly recycling clinches about how we are not going to let men of violence divide us, that we have more in common than that which separates us, that love beats hate, light beats darkness? Are we in for a future of hash tags and national monuments lit up with the flag of the latest nation to be attacked?

In the matter of illegal immigration the media always concentrate on the women and children even though pictures of the migrants always show a majority are young men.

We seem to be being directed down a road that shows us that the only socially acceptable response to all this is empathy. Cry all you want at the awfulness of it all but that's as far as it goes. Don't use logic to try and think about the causes of all this bad stuff, the only thing required from us is tears and sad songs.

I don't like it much. I distrust the motives of the people who are pushing this.

Fully agree. The ball started rolling with Diana, and it's since become something on an industrial scale. Exactly the same these days at football matches, a minute's silence, (or worse still applause), seems to have become a recurring norm. Or a variation, we'll all clap 76 times in the 76th minute or some other such nonsense.

As for the politicians' pious pronouncements, I simply turn the television off.

And that's actually the rub. I don't think it will draw a fractured society together. True empathy has disappeared out of the window, leaving only the frivolous and the fake.

I have found myself switching off more and more. To be honest I have felt slightly guilty about it but there is too far too much repetition. Sky news is the worst.

As I don't watch Broadcast TV, I don't have to sit through anything I don't want to watch. In the News I quite simply ignore them.

We used to be British. Apparently we're someone else now.....

Suff wrote: We used to be British. Apparently we're someone else now.....

Yes, I agree, - but what are we now?

In my lifetime I have seen plenty of change. I don't suppose that in any similar period of time in the past has
there been so much change, some for the better and some for the worse. What further changes can we expect?

What these people are doing is maudlin, it is not empathy. It is insincerity passed off as solidarity with people who they never knew or were ever likely to meet as though they were "besties" and inseperable.

It is the same when schools, the police, fire service etc come out with the touchy-feely and blancmange "our thoughts are with...".

I am like Cromwell in being suspicious of the people pushing this agenda.

Workingman wrote:What these people are doing is maudlin, it is not empathy.

I think that is correct. There was another bit on the news last night, an MP in tears about the lad from Northern Ireland who needed cannabis oil. And mejor upset about children being separated from their parents at the US/Mexican border. Yes, that's horrible. But the reason that's happening is that their parents were entering the USA illegally - a little nugget of fact buried under a landslide of faux outrage.

cromwell wrote:Yes, that's horrible. But the reason that's happening is that their parents were entering the USA illegally - a little nugget of fact buried under a landslide of faux outrage.

At the risk of going off topic, this little fact has driven the US to leave the UN Human Rights Council. A move which will, I am sure, be damned to the ends of the earth. However, it won't change the decision.

That is an interesting and significant move. It makes the UK leaving the ECHR framework a minor shockwave in the middle of an earthquake. Should we decide to do it, that is.

I see this excessive rubbing of salt into open wounds as part and parcel of the whole thing. Perhaps things will, eventually, begin to change?? We never did that. We, the British, remembered but did not obsess. We accepted the harsher facts of life with quiet dignity and reserve. The British way of life was to get over things, but not to forget. Britain has lived the saying "Revenge is a dish best served (eaten), cold", we have made an art form of it.

This Obsessive, Maudlin, Apologist, approach to life and governance is not one I recognise as British. Hence why I say we are no longer British in our outlook and that I do not recognise my country of birth. Maybe it is just the press, but then again maybe it is what we are actually turning into because of all the stimulus in our lives which tell us that is how to behave.

Last night on Look North, a puff for the upcoming "Better Together" events around the country to mark the murder of MP Jo Cox, plus an interview with her parents. This comes a couple of days after Look North marked the second anniversary of her murder. They also featured the tenth anniversay of a local murder, again interviewing the bereaved parents of the victim.

This stuff is unceasing.

Yesterday Sky ran with tributes to three men hit by a train in south London.

Tributes?

They were 'graffiti artists' - vandals - trespassing on the railway, an offence attracting a term in jail.

Yes, they died, an unimaginably horrific death, but 'tributes'?