Of late, I started reading deep into the news.
Not the headlines but beyond the headlines.
Spending some of the precious time that I don’t have trying to understand things that are happening around me to figure out if there’s anything that I can do or should do differently.
And so, we (or at least someone) needs to find the wisdom of King Solomon.
So, let me try and explain and keep up, because this is complicated.
Four years ago, in a whole other lifetime, I was sat in a hotel in a city in China talking to a young woman about childcare.
The young woman in question had been ‘assigned’ to me by the company I was travelling with as a head of education. She explained that she was married and had a son, but she lived far, far away in another city on the other side of China.
Her aunt looked after her son (he was 2 years old) and she got to see him, at best, once a week but often much less.
She had an apartment in the city with her husband which had 2 bedrooms and her aunt stayed there when she was not.
I remember one conversation with her vividly where she said, “the women in the west have to work like this”.
That is exactly what she said with the emphasis on the ‘have’ not the choose.
Jump to an article in The Times last week from the head of GCHQ (spies in the UK). The Chinese satellite system that’s being constructed over our heads will have the ability to track individuals using their mobile phones and almost certainly technology linked to TikTok.
We give our children full access to TikTok and allow them to give all their data to TikTok all the time.
Jump to another social media story where Elon Musk will almost certainly take control of Twitter and where he has already posted a picture of himself and Kanye West (who is about to take control of Parler) suggesting that they will both provide social media channels where ‘anything goes’ and censorship will be finished.
Fine to express your horrific antisemitic views on an open network where you will never be turned off and it’s everyone else’s responsibility to mute you if they want.
Jump again to another story about China where a young couple are in an apartment and there is a knock at the door.
In keeping with China’s 0 covid policy they’re told to get out and go immediately to an isolation centre for an unspecified number of days (when they don’t have covid and haven’t tested positive).
The interchange is videoed and immediately goes viral around Chinese social media platforms.
The man refuses to go and refuses to allow his partner to go.
The official warns them that noncompliance will be very bad for them and their children and their grandchildren.
The man says, “but we are the last generation”.
So, what is the point of all this inane rambling (I warned you that it was complicated).
Jump to the news in the UK this week of political leadership which lacks any sort of political insight and all aspects of leadership.
Of leadership that tried to railroad supply style economics into an economic situation which is already completely dysfunctional.
The use of a narrative that economic growth cures everything is worn out and completely broken. A narrative that meant we allowed big technology into every single aspect of our public and private lives without any barriers, a narrative that allowed us to sell our children’s psychology to advertising, a narrative that allowed us to be used as the product which is the final end game to complete brokenness.
Elon Musk and Kanye will push into hyperdrive the polarisation of social media and the growth of ultra-right and ultra-left wing politics.
The British government will continue to pretend and pay lip service to the green agenda or a health agenda while stripping back any advantage of green technology and opening Starbucks and Costa and McDonalds on every single corner and then wondering why our children are obese.
China will continue to try to capitalise communism while breaking its young population to the point where the desperation is so bad that they would not bring children into the world.
In the last 2 weeks we’ve been told by our Prime Minister that she refuses to indulge in ‘nanny state politics’ but what other type of politics could we have?
If we continue for any longer in an unregulated environment, we will run ourselves to death from carbon, eat ourselves to death from fast food and all die like Ben Stiller at the end of Dodgeball 40 stone on a couch surrounded by buckets of chicken.
For those of us who don’t, the despair and the mental disease will grow so bad that we could not even countenance the possibility of bringing children into a world that we broke.
And so, is that it? Is there no other answer?
Perhaps all we have left is the ability to try to indulge in some form of personal leadership that changes our own tiny and completely insignificant part of the world.
In addition to that, we need leadership. It’s clear that the drive towards hyper-consumerism makes us hyper-consume.
It’s clear that the incessant drive for growth makes us grow but not in good ways, it makes our waists grow, our mental illness grow, our inherent lifestyle linked diseases grow, our overall societal unhappiness grow and also the horrible divisions in society between the rich and the poor.
It’s time for leaders all through our society to make a different choice and to go in a different direction.
If women in China are asking men from the West if women in their countries have to work as hard as they do, this problem is greater than the east midlands.
Our politicians taught us to forget society and to concentrate on our individual well-being.
In forgetting society, we devastated our individual wellbeing and all we have left now is to make a choice to be a greater benefit to the society that we would like to have.
A long time ago my dad taught me to wake up each morning and open my eyes and be grateful that I was still there (he lost his brother at age 30) and so, perhaps the question I need to ask every time I open my eyes now and realise that I am still here is “if not now then when and if not you then who?”
Blog Post Number - 3237