‘amongst the most disturbed on the planet’.
Dear reader, now the G19 is over, and we’ve all had a good taste of Donald and ugly protesters, it’s time for a considered piece from our sage of the near north east Ira. He’s sent this reply to Sir Atney of Emo. We’ve taken the liberty of editing it a little. However, the juices remain as flavoursome as ever. Please read on.
‘Their emotional wiring is so warped, that they cannot now deal with warmth and closeness and trust’
We fostered kids for about fifteen years. Some of these foster kids were (and are) amongst the most disturbed on the planet. This condition is brought about in a very simple way. Parents, distracted by either indifference, or the more common cocktail of violence, drugs, or sexual deviance, neglect their children, both physically and emotionally. Kids, if they are to grow up in any normal way, desperately need love, warmth and security, most importantly in the first six or seven years of their lives. In the absence of these essentials the child cannot learn to function successfully in our society. All modern research indicates that these neglected or abused children, to a greater or lesser degree, are permanently emotionally crippled. Even with new, warm and supportive foster parents, the damage cannot be undone. The neglected child, the emotionally traumatised child grows up completely unable to relate to society’s norms, the essential glue that holds our society together. Society only works if we all contribute to this ‘glue’. Sadly these kids, through no fault of their own, are made incapable of contributing because they simply do not, or cannot make sense of a system which seems to them, entirely alien. Their emotional wiring is so warped, that they cannot now deal with warmth and closeness and trust.They believe these traits to be, if anything, an exploitable weakness and believe neglect, violence and indifference to be how society works. Many of them become petty criminals simply because they see nothing wrong with stealing whereas to our society the act is an erosion of the glue that holds the edifice together. Sexually abused women commonly become prostitutes because being used for sex as kids at least got them cuddles and attention and warmth.
‘They therefore set about ways of nullifying it’.
Hamburg. Zombies? Just consumers
Post the Hitler war we grew up in a society that we believed, catered royally for us. We had the NHS, the pension, the dole and a governmental determination never to allow the horrors of the great Depression to occur again. Governments, for one brief shining moment, really believed that their primary duty was to protect their citizenry. As a consequence the immediate post war years were quickly rattled out of their leftover Victorian values and replaced with the celebratory excesses of the next twenty five years.
Then slowly, insidiously, along came neo-liberalism which began quietly replacing the idealism of the post war years with a much harsher, uncaring, every-man -for-himself attitude.
Hamburg
People of my mature years remember the excitement of the ’50s and ’60s and remember, despite the Bomb, MAD and the Nuclear Winter, there was an almost explosive feeling of optimism and hope in the air. I believe certain elements of rightwing government saw this hedonistic optimism as not just a threat to ‘stable’ government, but a potential source of perhaps even armed revolution itself. They therefore set about ways of nullifying it.
Quadrupling the price of oil in the early seventies created a recession which put thousands out of work and which effectively replaced ‘peace and love’ and ‘changing the world’ with the much more mundane business of paying the rent. This strategy worked so effectively and created such a slump that it also created the ideal proving ground for lunatic ‘economists’ to step in to ‘revitalise’ the economy. The result of these ‘economic’ measures, in the early 21st. century, was to bankrupt the West.
So, to return to my damaged children…
Not if you’re the 1%
Anybody born in the last forty years has known nothing but ‘economic rationalism’. This system, in the end, has betrayed its supporters by consigning western economies to the industrial junk heap. Successive governments have, in turn, betrayed their own citizenry, time and time again by not only failing to control, but actively encouraging these ‘economic’ charlatans. The citizenry, I believe, like the foster kids, need someone to trust. They need to believe that governments, like their own parents, have their interests at heart. They need someone to look up to, someone to care about them, someone to trust. A citizenry is like a family and the responsibility for that family lies with the government. When this fails, when the people have been betrayed time and time again through the indifference of governments, why are these same governments surprised when, with no one left to trust, the people, their people, make brainlessly irrational decisions to elect people like Trump and Farage, or indeed Teresa to office?
Undoubtedly,these are the decisions of a people made mad by betrayal and neglect. These conditions are much more susceptible to the mayhem of revolution than those of the 60s and 70s. They also echo the endlessly irrational behaviour of some of the worst of our foster kids.
Might is Right.
Forgive me, but I see an obvious parallel here between family and country, which I feel goes some way towards explaining the how and why a traumatised American people brought about Trump’s triumphal ascension to the White House and the Presidency. I could say the same for the British Prime Minister, but thankfully things already seem to be swinging in Corbyn’s favour.