I’ve been reading ‘The Spectator‘ and I think everyone should read it and I would very much like to know if there is anything else like it or – wonder of wonders – perhaps even better.
The Wikipedia article I’ve linked to up there gives a good run down on the magazine but never says what I would say.
What I would say is that it reveals truths no one else reveals. Not distant, fine detail, abstruse, arcane truths – no, everyday kind of things that we all ought to be aware of but which nothing else makes us aware of.
Our media is pitiful. Our existences are pitiful. We are at a mad hatter’s tea party. The news of the day coming so fast from so many quarters that there’s no room, no time, and possibly no interest, in expanding on what’s important, relevant.
If we took notice of all the facts we would run our countries, which is what we boastfully claim our much vaunted ‘democracy’ allows us to do.
But actually our democracies are run by a handful of powerful activists here and there. Political parties can be elected by a mere handful of voters. Policies can be manipulated, created, modified, by a handful of power brokers.
We love looking at the ‘third world’ or the ‘undeveloped’ world and finding ‘corruption’ and misuse of monies. But read The Spectator for 12th Feb 2011 ‘Councils of Despair’ and get a line on just how endemic our own corruption and misuse of funds is – inasmuch as there’s an entrenched, deeply entrenched, system of certain people voting themselves large salaries out of all proportion to what they do.
We all know this is true. The Spectator issue I mention refers to local Councils doing it. But we all know the Banks do it. The Investment Funds do it. Public ‘Institutions’ such as the Telecomms with public money do it.
We know it is done everywhere in our own countries, in our own proud stain free ‘democracies’.
But it is blatant, obvious misuse of funds and corruption of duty of care etc…
It is obvious corruption of our democracy.
We know about it.
But we don’t care about it. The fact gets one – liner reportage and no one says anything at all. Newspapers, reporters, drop the subject because apparently no one is interested.
It is bigger than that. Also reported in the Spectator. One of their issues points out that we spend billions (‘we’ the western world, mainly UK, is what we’re talking about) on Africa, for instance, nominally to help the poor bloody Africans, living in the abject poverty we are all so familiar with.
But these funds are routinely misappropriated. This is no secret. This is, truly, ‘routine’.
We fund this ‘routine’. How culpable are we?
Yep. Everyone should read ‘The Spectator’. And whatever else there is of the same ilk. And there is more. I know there is.
We should pull our heads up out of the sand, out of those tv boxes, out of those pc screens, away from the football game or wherever we’ve got them stuck. Pull our heads out and look around and see what we are and what world we’re living in.
Why? Because we are not what we think we are. The world is not what we think it is. So it is good, refreshing, natural, true, lively, honest, to see the truth.
It is a better life. It is coming to life. It is ‘waking up’. It is time we ‘woke up’. It is.
It is time I woke up, I know that, and I find myself belatedly doing just that… dumbstruck by the revelations I run across these days…
I began this blog, and the web page behind it, in the interests of exposing some truth because of a lame approach to their jobs of some teachers, administrators, politicians relevant to my own locality, my own children and their schools right here where I live.
But now I find many things. I find no one is interested on the one hand. On the other hand I find many people interested as indicated by the number of venues already doing a better job than I could even dream of to reveal this kind of incompetency and maladministration, injustice, farce, whatever…
Venues such as web sites and such as magazines like ‘The Spectator’.
Yes. I found all this. And it has shut me up somewhat. Staggered me. My own little issues seem so petty compared with what I find now.
But petty or not what I find now is that the biggest problem we’ve got is so much going wrong, heading in the wrong direction, being misadministered, being badly done, and not enough interest, not enough attention on our part, we the public, not enough feedback, kick back, reaction, protest, input, manifestation of ourselves….
So I find myself back with my own petty issues and a ‘directive’ or motivation or something from this realisation, this fact I’ve found of the ‘way things are’, that makes it imperative that I pursue my own little ‘petty issues’ because that’s exactly what is wrong, exactly, just that: no one is pursuing their own ‘petty issues’ and the field is taken by default by those who wouldn’t work in an iron lung, those who maladminister, those who cheat and lie and steal… etc…
So that’s the point I’ve, as usual, floundered around spending so many words finding… everyone should read The Spectator and similar publications so that they can, after being deluged and inundated, swamped, by the enormous amounts of information regarding the parlous state of the world, our world, come to see the nub of it, the hub of it, the centre of it, the point of it: We are needed, to get up and speak, to do.
Like, perhaps, they are doing now in the Middle East.
Only we don’t need to be so extreme.
But we do need to be very aware, very clear, very well informed.