My daughter's boyfriend (now fiancée) studied history for his degree in London, and Tom Reason, our Marketing and academy director, did the same at the University of East Anglia.
One of the things about studying history is that it allows you to have a better time horizon, a better view of the length of time that history actually takes to unfold.
As you woke up on Friday morning, if you checked the news, it would have told a story about the breakdown of politics in the United Kingdom, and about the shattering of the two-party system and the emergence of what could become the seven-party system.
The greater the number of parties, the greater the individual voice, the greater the amount of (seemingly) disagreement of antagonism, of disenchantment.
There are many people now who are massively invested in the political train that they're on, at the expense of any other political train which may be present, and that's to the extent of 6 other parties' worth of people, because if you're on the one train and don't listen to anyone else on the other train, then you're isolating yourself into a bubble over here.
I'm thankful for the fact that by accident, I never ever became politically loyal to any individual mantra or party; it always seemed too complicated for me, too convoluted, but also just too difficult to attach myself to one individual person or personality.
I grew up on the left in shipbuilding in the west of Scotland; every single person I knew was an ardent Labour supporter.
Now I'm a ‘rich dentist’ living in England, so therefore I should be blue, far to the right, sitting in a position where I want the assets or the wealth that I might have been able to build through my career.
The main point of this, though, is that it was looking like living in a fractured country with problems associated with our welfare state, lack of spending on defence, an oil crisis in the Gulf, and the rise of China, who might well very soon invade Taiwan.
For people younger than me, it might start to look like the worst crisis that we've ever seen, and potentially the end of days and the end of the world.
It may well be, but it's unlikely. We have had oil crises, wars, pandemics, economic disasters and all sorts of situations like this, even in the short space of my lifetime, many times. Understanding that we might be in a worse situation than it felt like a year ago or 5 years ago, does not mean it will always be like this.
The only thing we can really control is that which is immediately around us, and therefore, if all of us choose to control that and be reasonable and not shout, and work with everyone else, really for the benefit of society and humanity, and not necessarily just for our own individual benefit, right now, everything is likely to be fine. Why don't we get on with that over a long time horizon, instead of absolutely stressing over what someone has said about us on social media yesterday?
Blog Post Number - 4525
Leave a comment