Representative

This is the Palace of Westminster.

It's where Parliament sits, when it does. That's where the laws of the country get settled. There's more to it than that in the grand scheme of things, but for a basic overview, that will probably suffice.

The people in the two houses of Parliament - the House of Commons and the House of Lords - are really, really not like you and me.

No, I'm not going to repeat some weird antisemitic conspiracy theory involving shape changing animals and mind control. I'm going to prove it with two of my favourite tools: Statistics and Anecdotes.

Lets start with the stats, shall we?

The average age of a person in the UK - as of 2020 - is 40.5 years of age. There's approximately 99 men per every 100 women, leading to women making up 50.25% of the population. Around about 87% of the UK is white, and 60% identifies as Christian of whatever denomination. (The next highest religious choice is None, which sits at around 26%.) The average household income annually is £29,800 - though we're going to see a graph about that later that might pique some interest. 7% of the children in the UK attend private schools (the cost of attendance of these schools is on average around £17,200 a year), and around 50% of those who leave compulsory schooling in the UK attend higher education afterwards (which costs approximately £18,000 a year, unless you went between 1962 and 1998, in which case it was free).

(Those statistics were pulled by a variety of sources, including IPSOS-MORI, the Office of National Statistics, and a dozen others; feel free to have a quick check around to check my maths if you feel I've flubbed them somewhere. If I'm wrong I'm not too proud to admit it.)

Let's take a look at the House of Commons.

The average age of an MP is 50 years - Mhairi Black of Renfrewshire is the youngest current MP at 22. Women make up 32.5% of the Commons, 211 of them versus 437 men. 92% of MPs are white. There's no religious data kept on MPs, though 2% of them are Muslim, compared to 5% of the population of the country. Their average household income is skewed by the fact that they are paid over £70,000 a year, plus expenses, plus pay for cabinet positions; though perhaps an inference to the income of the households they came from can be provided by the next statistic. 29% of MPs were educated in private schools - 45% of the Conservative party, significantly ess for other parties - and 89% of them are University graduates, with a full 23% of them holding a degree from Oxford or Cambridge. Due to their average age, this means that most of them attended University during the years when it was free to do so.

(These stats were almost all provided by the House of Commons itself.)

These are the people we vote for, with our weird old voting system that is long out of date and seriously needs renewal.

When something is described as a Representative Democracy, it means that citizens Democratically select people to Represent them in the political arena; but it seems that the people that get picked don't actually represent the population of this country, in several ways.

For example the Isle of Wight is represented by one Bob Seely, who isn't from here, doesn't spend much time here, and doesn't really respond to any letters sent to him by his constituents, so, you know.

Is this, perhaps, why decisions are often made that don't seem to be the best for the average person in this country? It might explain why our current political establishment has precious little empathy for anyone of an average income or a less than ideal life situation. The phrase "Out Of Touch" used to mean that individuals didn't understand the basic needs and pressures of life, before it got co-opted by people to try and undermine actual experts.

Statistics don't always tell the full story, admittedly. As promised, here's a little graph of the average household income in the UK; and you can see where the average is, and that is definitely not where the highest point of the graph sits.

Looks like the average gets shunted up quite a lot by those folks up near the other end, hmm? Which happens to include MPs, on their £70,000 a year.

But that's only one side of our government. The OTHER side is composed of the House of Lords, which is... a bit different.

The average age in the House of Lords is 70 years old - more than one of them were born in the 1920s. 27.6% of peers are women. The House of Lords is 94% white. Religion is actually weirdly statistically skewed in the Lords due to the fact that the Church of England gets to have 26 Bishops sit in the chamber just by virtue of being the apparent state religion. They're called the Lords Spiritual. That doesn't mean there can't be MORE Bishops - the rest have to earn their place the usual way. (By being nice to the government.) The Peers of the House of Lords do not receive a salary; they can claim £305 per day in expenses (or a reduced rate of £150 per day). Here come the big deviations; approximately 57% attended private school. 90% of them attended University, in a similar proportion to the House of Commons.

And, of course, we don't elect them. They get chosen; and often they are chosen by whoever is in government at the time. A recent example of this being news was when Jon Bercow, former Speaker of the House and well-known for annoying the current Tory party by insisting they not be disrespectful in the Commons, was snubbed for a peerage - despite almost every single former Speaker of the House being offered one in the past. Theresa May's husband, Boris Johnson's brother and Ian Botham the Cricketer were all offered seats, mind. Can't think why.

This does mean that governments can, effectively, try and seed a legacy of Lords that will be friendly to their cause later on down the road; loading the metaphorical deck with individuals that will vote the same way they do, or the same way that the party in general likes to vote.

And that's entirely putting aside the influence of government advisors, who are utterly unaccountable.

What does this mean for you and me? Well, it means that those that make the decisions are often fairly far removed from the decisions that they end up making. Humans tend to naturally have selective empathy that they reserve for those that are more like them than not, which is why the Prime Minister burned a £50 in front of a homeless man, amongst other charming little anecdotes.

Note, I am not forgiving them - because learning to have empathy and to think about how things affect others is a big part of being a decent human being. Deliberately not doing so is ignorant at best and malicious at worst.

It says a lot that the standardised uniform of the House of Commons used to include a black silk top hat. In fact, there's a whole anecdote (I TOLD YOU) about one man who brought his working class ethic into the Commons.

Keir Hardie was a gent. He helped form the Labour Party as it exists today. He stood for progressive taxes, women being allowed to vote, the abolition of the House of Lords and free education for all. This is a genuine campaign poster for when he ran for Parliament in 1892.

Notice how he is not wearing a top hat. Keir Hardie entered the Chamber wearing the cloth deerstalker hat, a normal working man's suit and a red tie, and caused a significant uproar by doing so. He faced many accusations of undermining the reputation of the House, by "wearing the cloth cap" of the working class.

Think about that, for a moment, as you take in the things that the man was campaigning for. An eight-hour work day - he wanted to bring us DOWN to an eight-hour work day. With the single exception of temperance reform (the temperance movement was a whole other thing), we can get behind that entire list, and frankly, laws have been put in place to cover almost all of it.

Things have improved somewhat since then, obviously. Most people don't wear hats into the Chamber these days; and while there is still an expectation of a certain level of decorum, and traditional behaviours undertaken by all in the House, we've got a far clearer idea of what is actually disrespectful these days.

Right.

So how do we change this? How do we make the House of Commons more like the majority of the country, and thus more representative, and more likely to work in the interests of most of us? And, it follows, more likely to promote Lords that agree with that agenda?

Unfortunately, we have to vote.

We have to get involved at a local level. I know that in some areas, that is harder than others. That some places are seen as safe seats for the incumbents. But without the work being put in, nothing will change. We need to attack political apathy wherever we find it. It is said that if voting changed anything they would ban it - but if it didn't change anything, why would they spend millions of pounds and a huge amount of effort trying to sway the process one way or another?

And we need to make that push now. We need to do it while the government is showing us who it really is - not in three years, when it can start to hide all its fuckups. Now.

Because representation matters, but so does action.

Thank you for reading. Support your humble author via Patreon or Kofi, or follow social media on the right. See you next week.

No War In Ba Sing Se

At times, when the world is a dumpster fire, it can feel like focusing on something that isn't the dumpster fire is a little bit like insisting there is no war in Ba Sing Se.

Two competing drives: one to not be dragged down by the soul-sucking quagmire of shit that is the bad news, one to not turn away from it and let it slide.

Not an easy balancing act.

I am of course a huge proponent of the fact that we contain multitudes. That it is possible to be aware of and think about multiple things at once. Like when a news story pops up, and the immediate response is "They're just using X to distract you from Y", well - they may be hoping that is what will happen, but fact is, most people don't forget X just because they are absorbing Y.

The event I covered last week - the explosion at the docks in Beirut - didn't make us forget that they still haven't locked up the cops that killed Breonna Taylor.

But while we can think about multiple things at once, it's hard to write a piece that covers a multitude of situations that are occurring, and not feel like there might be something else that one is missing.

The exam results, for one.

Where the Coronavirus pandemic has absolutely shit-showed the education system for a while - like really knocked the crap out of it - kids haven't been able to take their exams. Given that our system as it exists doesn't take very much into account in terms of delays, the government decided in its wisdom to let the Office of Qualifications (Ofqual) throw together an algorithm to sort out who deserved what grade.

Ofqual were offered assistance by the Royal Society of Statistics - the kind of people that would be quite good at analysing and utilising significant swathes of data - but wouldn't accept the assistance unless the RSS signed a Non Disclosure Agreement.

And thus, over a third of A Level students awaiting their grades to get them into University found that they had been marked down - substantially in a lot of cases - from every prediction that they had been given, and thus, denied their shot at higher education because the computer said no.

Notably, there was a significant statistical trend toward these downgraded marks happening in low-income areas.

The government dismissed any concerns as to their short-selling literally hundreds of thousands of teenagers, because why would they give a fuck? Everyone in Eton got the grades they wanted.

Lets face it, the system wasn't great in the first place, but to fuck it up this badly and then just wash your hands of it is a disgrace.

At the same time as our government fails our youth, some people are angry that we haven't sent out the navy to blow up innocent people in the channel, legally seeking asylum.

This, of course, is very useful to certain members of the government. There's a certain hard core of people in this country that have zero empathy toward foreigners of any kind, and if the government can be seen to be hating refugees as much as they do, then they can rely on the support of that hard core. The fact that they can just suspend their feelings toward the people, actual people, desperately trying to find somewhere safe to live, desperate enough that they would take an unsafe boat across the Channel to a country that seems to hate them, is indicative of a deeper problem.

The landslide of shit isn't constrained to this side of the Atlantic, obviously. Protests against racial injustice continue, and while a hundred tiny platitudes are made by people that aren't being asked to make them, the actual changes demanded aren't being made.

Then there is the ongoing war against an actual democratic election.

It is, of course, just like Donald Trump to torpedo a lifeline service for millions of people - even a significant percentage of his voter base - because it is a means by which people can vote. When your tactic to win the election is to prevent people from voting, you know that you've messed up.

It's working, though. The US Postal Service has had its Postmaster General replaced with an individual that seems to be determined to run it into the ground, and by their direction, postboxes in Blue-voting neighbourhoods in Red states are being removed, and the entire service is being slowed down by various measures.

And he ADMITTED it, that this was his plan... because, well... what can anyone do about it?

There were more fraudulent signatures on the paperwork that got Kanye West registered on voter forms than there were fraudulent votes in the entire 2016 election, but... you know.

If you are seeing a common thread behind this landslide of shit, you are right to.

Also the ice caps are melting because of us and a virus is killing us because a significant chunk of the population don't like masks and don't think it's real.

So... picking out one of those for a deep dive feels like I am ignoring the others. And picking out none of them feels like I am ignoring the entire world.

What a shit time to be a thinker.

And I've been looking for the little bright moments in amongst this torrent of fecal matter, and they are... few and far between. And often they only exist because the shitty situation necessitated them in the first place. But they DO exist.

The government - and not just the government - are so hostile to the presence of refugees on our shores that when celebrities and individuals express sympathy towards them, they're immediately attacked for it. Told they are Virtue Signalling - something I have spoken about before. That they are just trying to look good without doing anything about it. "Have you housed any refugees, Gary?" he was asked by a galaxy-brain Twitter user. "Not yet," he replied - accompanied by his paperwork for actually doing that very thing.

Despite the carnage of an overwhelmingly undergraded A Level crop this year, Oxford University College is honouring all of the offers that it made, regardless of the probably fallacious results sent out by Ofqual.

A study involving Cambridge university, an Estonian university and several Swedish university groups has found a protein that could prevent Alzheimer's.

Ben Shapiro, right-wing munchkin, is getting his ass royally roasted after deciding to take a swing at successful hip hop musicians. It seems he doesn't believe that vaginas can self-lubricate, if sufficiently stimulated. I suppose the abstinence method of sex education has its flaws. His poor wife.

We're still here, life still carries on, and with every day that we have, we can try and make things better. Not just for ourselves, either.

I suppose that is the takeaway.

Yes, there is a war in Ba Sing Se - but there's cabbages, too.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Money Talks

I'd like to conduct a mental exercise with your assistance.

Picture for me, if you will, a successful person holding an object of value. Imagine them in their home, and how that all looks.

Are we ready for the thought experiment?

Hands up if the person you imagined was wealthy, or had some obvious sign of being so - a suit or similar. Similarly, hands up if the object of value was an expensive one - and finally, hands up if the home would definitely rank on the pricey side.

I bet that's a few hands up. (Put em down again. You did it. Well done.)

Now you know my agenda, go ahead and look back at the request. I didn't mention money, not at all - though several of the words I used imply it.

We're paying attention to words at this point. The actual semantics of the situation. Now we can be careful about how we phrase things.

Who can remember a time when money didn't pretty much dictate our lives?

Not a lot of people who read this blog, that's for sure. There's a significant proportion of people alive in this day and age that live by subsistence farming and agriculture. Money probably doesn't come up for them very often - so I daresay it doesn't have the linguistic hooks dug into common parlance.

Here, though - here, today - most of the things we do have a coin involved somewhere. Work is so impressed on us, so central to our culture, that it is the default answer when someone asks us "What do you do?" - something I try and shake up whenever asked. "You mean for money or for fun?"

If we want to achieve almost anything, it is monetised - and if the act itself isn't, then the accessories and support services associated are. You can run for free, but these running shoes are £50 a pop. Lift weights? A branch will do - but unless you want splinters, join a gym, get the gloves, grab some dumbells.

To achieve things in this society - and to simply survive - we require money. It's difficult to do so otherwise. Some people do so, but they themselves will tell you how hard it is. Note that I do not mean living on benefits, as that is simply acquiring money from a different source (and is just as valid, if you are legally entitled to the money, you take it, it's yours). I mean literally not handling money at all. Often it results in criminality. This country has only just taken to heart the French idea to deliver unsold food - not even spoiled, just one day out of date - to places wherein the homeless and disadvantaged can access it.

Aspiration is often hitched to fiscal increase, too. If you want a better thing, it will cost you more - so you'd best get more money, hmm? And if the achievement doesn't require money or anything similar, then it is worth pointing out, because it is a difference, a change.

So when we talk about someone being successful, we assume that to mean wealthy - unless specified otherwise. Because what other universal handwave term for being well-off is there? Of course, in a world dictated by the flow of currency upward and upward, having more of it is a literal success.

Something being valuable is automatically assumed to mean expensive, too - because that is the de facto measurement of value. The thing is, the most valuable things to me are not the most expensive things I own, because there's levels of value. My most expensive possession is my laptop. Sure, I value it very highly - but not more than the silver chains my dad gave me, or the notebooks I have stuffed with old ideas, or the ticket stubs I still possess from the big five gigs of my life (Pearl Jam @ Hard Rock Calling 2010, Nine Inch Nails @ O2 2009, Counting Crows @ Brighton Arena 2009, Alter Bridge @ Portsmouth Guildhall 2008, Foo Fighters @ Wembley 2008), or the first CD I bought in America - also my favourite album of all time. Value is not monetary cost; however the cost is so important to us on a day-to-day basis that it becomes the standard assumed meaning.

The thing is, having money does not equate to having happiness or feeling satisfaction or security. It can contribute a whole hell of a lot, mind. If your income is very close to your expenditure, increasing that gap can only make life easier - there's less stress, less concern. We don't worry so much about having to take a week off, or missing the next pay raise, or the cost of bread increasing with little to no warning.

Of course it is also a truism that as income rises, so does expenditure. As we have more, so we take more. That's the nature of the beast - because again, in a society wherein the measure of success is money, that means that all goods that we may want have a cost, and the more desirable goods always cost more. Who doesn't want a slightly bigger fridge, a slightly nicer car, a slightly better laptop, a slightly larger house?

It all costs. We just accept that. To cover the costs we have to work, and we just accept that too. We earn so much less than the people who pretty much instituted this way of life, and we accept that also. It wasn't a shadowy conspiracy of a group of figures in a dark room. The people with the money just wanted to make more, and so they did. Because that's how it works. When you have it - you make more of it.

When you think about it like that...is it not surprising that whenever anyone suggests doing something that casually disregards the constant hunt for further funds, that it is treated with incredulity?

Traditionally, the Labour party in this country has been a left-wing worker's party. It was dragged more toward the centre-right in the late 90s by one Tony Blair. They did well, because after Margaret Thatcher's hatchet-job on the average blue-collar worker to line the pockets of the financiers, right-wing attitudes in this country had started to come to the fore - but the Tories still had the reputation of being nasty. So we can still be right-wing money-grubbers and also not be held up as evil? Sign me up!

The thing is, they took over the entire party. Tory-lites. Women and men whose view of the world was pretty much the same as their blue-tied brethren on the opposite benches, just with a nod to the poor and the sick. And don't get me wrong - having been on the receiving end of benefits and sickness support in both the Blair era and the subsequent ConDem/Tory era, that nod actually helped us out a lot.

Recently, the party voted for a new leader. That leader was Jeremy Corbyn, an old-fashioned left winger whose attitude is that we should really be helping people and doing the right thing regardless of income or profit.

For this, he was treated to a non-stop campaign of hate. People mocking him, calling him a communist (incorrect) and a socialist (they wouldn't know one if it hit them in the face), saying he was unelectable (despite being elected as party leader). There were threats of mass resignations, mass resignations, personal attacks, smear campaigns across the wide breadth of the media. The temptation of digging in and fighting back must have been great, but his line has always been the line of grace under fire. However much political capital he could have made from getting into verbal fisticuffs with all and sundry, he just got on with it.

All this came to a head in the most recent leadership re-election. A vote of no confidence was called. Those who wanted him gone were - as you'd expect - Blairite neo-Tory coatriders. Those who had profited from still being the right wing in an apparently left-wing party. Those comfortable in quiet opposition, which isn't really opposition when it comes down to it.

When it became clear that it would be down to the party members to vote, another hatchet job was put in place - and this time, it was basically electoral fraud. People who joined up for the party in droves in order to show their support for the party leader were told that they wouldn't get a vote, for...no apparent reason, other than the fact that Owen Smith and his people had ascertained that those new members were signing up to support Jeremy Corbyn. It doesn't take a genius or a statitician to work out that this was a calculated attempt to undermine support for the man who had already been made leader once.

Out of 551,000 members of the party, only 285,000 got to vote - just over half. Can you imagine the outcry if 49% of a country weren't allowed to vote in a General Election because it was thought that they were going to vote a specific way? Can you imagine? (If you live in Florida you don't have to imagine. Thanks, Jeb.)

Even so - out of the 285,000 that got their vote, over 168,000 of them voted for the unelectable man. 59% of them. Then there were the supporters and affiliated voters, whose support for him ran at an even higher percentage.

It's only now that we can understand where the term unelectable comes from.

In a world where a successful person is one who earns a lot of money, and a valuable object is one that costs a lot of money, the one who understands both of these things to be inherently true is seen as more acceptable, more grounded than the one who does not. If we accept blindly that money should rule our lives, then the man who wants us to believe this to be true is our friend, and the man who wants us to question this belief is our foe.

In a world wherein our way of thinking is highly informed by money and worth being commensurate, the man telling us that there's more to life than just money has to be painted as a madman, a man without a grasp on reality. A hopeless man. A man that can never lead, can never expect to be followed. A man that is unelectable.

Now look around you.

Are you a failure because you aren't earning more? Because you aren't living in a mansion? Are you a failure because you aren't bedecked in jewels and driving a sports car? Are you a failure because you buy things at a discount rather than crates of expensive nasty-tasting champagne?

Or are you a success because you made it this far, rather than by how much is in your bank account? Are you successful for reasons other than a six-figure salary? Do the things you own have value that isn't connected to how much they cost you? Is your home your home, regardless of how much smaller it is than the homes of those that collect our taxes and make our decisions?

If the answer to any of those is yes, then you are already smarter than the prevailing attitude. The natural divergence of semantics based on who dictates what is good or bad hasn't changed you into a heartless machine, driven by greed. Because at the heart of it, nobody really believes it. Not really. It's just the way the world seems to be going, and is the way the world has been going since enterprising merchants started agreeing that this much maize was worth this much silver.

If we are to be higher beings than this, if we are to be better than simply biological machines to be used to make money for ourselves and others, then we need to look at the use of these terms. We need to apply them differently, to make specific examples. We need to find value in that which is inexpensive, success in that which is unmarketable, happiness in that which is free, and worth in that which is penniless.

That is how we elect a man who is unelectable.

What We Don't Learn

What do you remember from school that you don't really use today?

A lot of you will reach for mathematics. Trigonometry, pi to a certain value, so on. Some people will talk about language, verbs and nouns. Some will claim science as the burden. A bit of this, a bit of that.

What about the things in school that you weren't taught?

I vaguely touched upon this last May in this blog right here, but I think that - in the wake of the referendum that has rocked the country - it deserves revisiting.

Let us ponder, for a moment, some wisdom from the late great George Carlin:

"You might have noticed that I never complain about politicians. I leave that to others. And there's no shortage of volunteers; everyone complains about politicians. Everyone says they suck. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky; they don't pass through a membrane from a separate reality. They come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, and American businesses. And they're elected by American voters. This is what our system produces, folks. This is the best we can do. Let's face it, we have very little to work with. Garbage in, garbage out."

Let's think about that for a moment.

Democracy is built on the people of a nation being involved in the decision-making process of that nation. It does not require, by definition, those decisions to be informed - but let's consider that for a moment.

Stepping out of the standpoints of various political parties - it is literally better, for the entire nation (if not the entire world), if those decisions ARE informed. A country's effectiveness and capacity to do right by its citizens depends on its capacity to make good decisions. Thus, it's in the interest of a nation to ensure those citizens can make those decisions well.

How to do that? Well, in order to make decisions, people need to understand the consequences of those decisions. A basic understanding of government, of society, of economics. Expertise is not necessary - but then the same can be said for mathematics, and very few people leave school without an expected basic level of knowledge.

Yeah, you hated learning trigonometry, but you know how many £2 loaves of bread you can get for a tenner.

How many of us left school in the knowledge of what national debt is, how taxes are collected and spent, or what the difference is between left-wing and right-wing? How many people do you know that don't really understand communism, socialism, capitalism, neoliberalism (and how different it is to liberalism), fascism?

BoyInABand did a song about this:

Trigonometry is, admittedly, more important to me than most people - I like maths - but if I had to choose between learning trig and learning LITERALLY how this country is run, I am going to pick the latter.

Kids aren't allowed to vote. Why? Because they don't understand the enormity of what they are doing, they don't understand what is going on, they don't know how the world works yet. They don't know how to make good decisions about the future of this country.

But...what about if you're an adult and you have no clue?

Picture this - two individuals. A seventeen year old that has been reading about politics and economics since they were twelve, who has taken an interest in it at a local level as well as a global one, who has demonstrated his knowledge in talks and debates - and a forty year old who has literally only ever seen one room in their entire lives, who knows nothing of the outside world and doesn't care to.

If the forty year old can convince people that he's sane - hell, who is to say he ISN'T sane? - then he gets a vote. He knows literally nothing but he gets a vote based purely on how long he's been on this earth.

The seventeen year old doesn't get shit.

To look at what happened in the Referendum of 23rd June, a great many people expressed significant confusion or lack of knowledge on the run-up to the vote. Some expressed the same on the same day. Many continued to express confusion and lack of knowledge AFTER they had already cast their vote, not having realised quite what they had voted for or what any of it meant, so they went with their gut instinct.

Nobody needs to be told what propaganda can do. It has turned entire nations into charicatures, legitimised slaughter without precedent, started wars and pogroms - the list goes on.

Propaganda isn't always posters on walls that tell you to hate. Sometimes it is more subtle. It comes in the form of agendas being described as truths. It comes in the form of identifying pre-existing prejudices and inflaming them, earning sympathy. See, we hate the same thing. We are on the same side.

I daresay that one reason that there's no education of politics and civics in schools is because, when the party that forms the government suggests such a thing, the other shoots it down - because they are afraid that Party A will sway the education toward their agendas. And when Party B come into power, the same happens. I think this is one limiting factor, perhaps the main one.

Of course there is also George Carlin's perennial thought that the government wants to keep us dumb. That the entire process is an exercise designed to give us enough hands on reins to make us think we know where the horse is going, without any capability of guiding it, no knowledge of how to feed or shoe it, and not even necessarily knowing it is a horse.

I don't subscribe to this particular theory. Mostly because I don't believe in conspiracy theories. There's easier ways to keep people dumb than generally bumbling around in a bureaucracy. Besides, it isn't as if the information isn't out there. It really is. You just need to actually go looking for it, and that's hard to do if you don't vaguely know what to go looking for in the first place.

So if we accept that an enlightened society is a better society - as I previously asserted - then we have to accept that not teaching people about politics is strictly a choice dictated by partisan division. If WE can't teach them OUR lesson, then THEY can't teach them THEIR lesson.

The answer is, in this country at least, an independent entity. This entity would set the template and curriculum for political education. It would be run past the Education Secretary for approval. It would be run past the Shadow Education Secretary for approval. In the end - once a balance is struck between the two, and with the input of others (I suggest perhaps some highly regarded political and economic scholars) - the curriculum is rolled out.

It is depressing that it would take that much effort, just to allow political and civic education for our children. To think that the only way that an education in the way the world works can occur requires pandering and hand-wringing to the extant powers that be - truth be told, it makes me feel a little ill. If that is the only way? It is the only way.

We can't afford to have the democratic future of this country in the hands of people that don't understand the consequences of their votes. Who admittedly, after the fact, hold up their hands and say they didn't know. Knowing who is in who's pocket is a difficult thing and requires some study - but knowing who makes the decisions, and who stands to gain from each of them, can begin that process.

Knowing where we are taxed and how much - knowing where that tax money is spent - knowing how an economy works, and how an economy can get into debt - all of these things are things I somewhat take for granted, now. They are things that I set out to learn because not knowing was infuriating, and now the infuration takes root in knowing that I still have just as much sway over the democratic process as the theoretical man in the room.

It is my opinion, and has been my opinion for many years, that we need to be taught these lessons in schools. I value the other lessons - mathematics, sciences, english - but a knowledge of how the world works is important, too.

And if we are going to stop children from voting because they don't know - if we are going to stop those without sound mind voting because they literally cannot make an informed decision - then we need to start making sure that everyone that ISN'T one of those things IS capable of making an informed decision.

Or we're going to end up with a pound in the shitter and an economy steadily flatlining.

...awkward.

Wide And Prejudiced

It is my belief and experience that every single person on this earth holds at least one prejudice.

More than one, usually - and that does not mean to say that everyone is a little bit racist (regardless of what the song tells you) or anything to that extent. More I am stating, with a degree of certainty, that everyone has at least one belief that is prejudicial, that is not borne out by evidence, but that is part of them and hard to even recognisea s a prejudice - let alone combat.

I am just as guilty of this as anyone else. I have several prejudices. The one I am going to be looking at, though, is my prejudice against the wealthy.

I think this is part of my raising as much as anything else. I was brought up during the time when Margaret Thatcher had her way with the economy, and when the divide between the rich and the poor just kept growing. My parents were both hard-working people, and both needed jobs. I saw very little of them; my dad in my early childhood, my mother in my tween-teen years.

I was always told by the wider world that being rich was the cure to all ills, and that everyone should shoot for that goal. Sure, there was the odd object lesson about money not buying you happiness; but each example of that was outshone by other examples, of how one needed to shoot for that new promotion, get that job, earn the respect of your peers. That was the prevailing culture.

At school, being poor was a thing to be looked down upon. It earned the derision of your peers. Despite the fact that we were children and couldn't earn our own money, we couldn't admit that we couldn't afford something. To do so was unthinkable. Rather than just say that our parents couldn't (or wouldn't) buy us the new trainers or the new game or whatever, we used to make up excuses as to why we didn't want them.

I once stood up for a friend of mine who was called some pretty fucked up names because they got school dinners paid for by the school.

It's very easy to have an unhealthy relationship with money. You may be looked down upon for it on a personal level, but hey - in business, you work for an organisation that has signed a contract stating it must try to make as much money as possible. That's corporate charter. Money, and the lust and reliance for it, is an immense evil that causes untold problems worldwide every day - and yet holds the world's economy together, in the optimistic hope that everyone's greed will somehow create a balance in which the market fixes everything.

We're told that what is good for the very rich is good for everyone. Usually we're told this by people who are fairly wealthy themselves, and this isn't an accident. We were told that trickle-down economics would benefit everyone, which it simply doesn't - the only thing that tends to trickle down is the burden of debt.

All this probably contributes to the way I feel about the wealthy. It's not a healthy thing to feel, but I feel it. I try not to let it effect how I live my life, but boy that is hard sometimes.

I feel that if one does have prejudice, it doesn't make you a bad person unless you act on it. If you try and fix it, or put it behind you and try and treat people decently regardless of your gut instinct, then it makes you a better person. If I help up someone who is my friend, isn't it more worthy of respect if I help up someone who is my enemy? We're all in possession of instinct - we defeat it every day with logic. That's what makes us better.

I have to acknowledge that how I feel is irrational. There are wealthy people who are good, both objectively and subjectively - and likewise, those who are poor can be bad. Income and resource does not dictate morality.

Still. I know it is there - but I'd rather know it is there so I can do something about it, rather than be unaware that I'm viewing the world through a flawed lens.

Learned Behavior (On Insecurity pt3)

This is the third part of a series of blog posts on insecurity. Each one will have a different theme.

As anyone who is anyone will be able to tell you - in Bowling For Soup's opinion, High School Never Ends.

How right are they?

I'm sure everyone I know either believes, or has been told, that school is the best days of one's life. Certain parts of it are awesome, sure - not paying bills is a wonderful thing, or worrying about work. Certainly things were easier on that side of the scale.

Mentally though? Emotionally, spiritually? Well, I suppose I can only speak for myself - but high school was never an environment in which I did remarkably well. The actual learning, the academics, that was just fine. People skills, though? Not being basically completely mental? Yeah, that fell down on me pretty hard.

I was in high school between 13 and 18. That school now deals with kids that are 11-18. This period in someone's life is...well...let's just say chemically difficult. You are pretty much at the mercy of a lot of hormones, a lot of brain chemistry, and a lot of alterations in one's physiology. That in itself is a difficult environment to exist in.

Then we add the tribal mentality that seems to exist. There's us and them - lots of different thems, sometimes a couple of different uses. It's our first taste of semi-adult sociology, and we come into this environment loaded with brains like chemical bombs.

The culture of school, of education, of being the age one is and doing the things one does at that age - it becomes something of a power struggle. Everyone has authority over a schoolkid. The teachers, other parents, other adults; and at a time when self-doubt is enforced upon you by simple virtue of hormonal shift, that lack of control and agency can lead to some pretty harmful mental states. One grasps for power and control wherever they can. Sure, that teacher there has the authority to make you do things and you have to listen - so obviously, if you find a way to "get one over" on that teacher, to express some form of dominance or control, then...well, you're hard pressed not to take it.

That goes double for other kids - because if you push a teacher, or try and bully an adult, there are repercussions. Try it with your peers, though? You will almost certainly get away with it. As evidenced by the fact that bullying is still pretty much widespread to endemic proportions even today, in this enlightened age.

It's a truism oft repeated by the victims of bullying that those doing it only do it because they're insecure. That's probably right. They feel like they aren't in control of their environment, so they strive to take control over part of it - their victim. Power is a stimulant. Once you've had a little of it, you want more, and sometimes you want it more than you want to be a good person.

We've all heard that school is the best years of our lives - have we not also all heard that kids are cruel? Or witnessed that cruelty? They can be assholes - to each other even more so than outsiders. Trust me, I was one, and even though I spend most of my time keeping my head down and avoiding being targeted, I did my fair shair of asshole things.

The thing is, I look at some of the behaviour people demonstrate long after high school, and a lot of it hasn't actually changed that much.

Why would it, in fairness? Sure, we grow up - our tastes change - we pick up responsibilities and learn how to cope with them, we learn hard lessons and have life experiences both good and bad. Our mentality has already been shaped, though; and unshaping it is hard work, sometimes harder than people are willing to work toward.

Xenophobia is a high school behaviour, which develops even earlier than that - as social structures get formed they decide that some things are okay and some things aren't, and anything different or weird is a very obvious target. That can last - that can stick around, especially if unchallenged. Likewise, the power politics of the playground; alphas beating their chests, social climbers belittling others, unspoken rules being set and those who don't follow them being mocked. Now what I've just described could happen anywhere at any age after middle school. Admit it: you've been in places like that, or at least heard of them.

We were all in a state of constant insecurity once. We learned some lessons that hurt a hell of a lot, and we picked up some habits that don't help us very much in adult life. It's hard to break a habit. Trust me, I know.

If only we could recognise it in ourselves and do something constructive about it...maybe we'd all be a little happier.