TONY ON PARANOIA, TT #27 & MORE

Including Thursday Thirteen, Totally Optional Prompts and Heads or Tails.
Have you had a go yet?

British Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, has said that children should be getting careers advice from as young as age ten. Well, that alright then. Everyone wants to be an astronaut. That’s the kind of thing they want to be at that age. It is all part of a child’s wonderful imagination. But now the government wants to destroy it!

Education is now geared only for employment.

Education for education’s sake is gone. And now it seems childhood itself is being legislated out of existence. It was a brief flirtation with youth, begun when middleclass Victorians decided children needed a rounded education.
Prior to this, children were mini-adults who worked from a young age. Extending childhood for education was what made the west an intellectual race. This is now being reversed. After all, totalitarian government doesn’t want educated people.
They revolt!

We are entering the Age of Paranoia.

So says psychiatrist Dr Daniel Freeman, and I tend to agree with him. One in four of us, it seems, suffer irrational fears of being threatened. And the answer is obvious. We have practically destroyed our sense of community and family, leaving us alone in a world we do not understand.
This irrationality is leaking into government. Just a quick trawl through the weekend’s newspapers offers a couple of proofs. The British police want to secretly collect DNA samples from everyone from our tea cups and cigarette butts.
Even worse, a Bill is about to go to Parliament asking for the right to form a database logging every email, website visit and mobile phone call. This tips the balance of the citizen in the State. The State becomes primary – just like fascism.
Such things are totally against the idea of freedom. Government has a right to demand you pay your taxes and obey a fair common law. Anything else is undemocratic, and should be resisted totally. Yet this is the result of the liberal yearning for freedom from bigotry and intolerance. It has left us in a world where government has become the parent, dictating to the citizen/child. We are right to be fearful.
Next post, Thursday. See you then.

© Anthony North, October 2008

TT #27 – INJUSTICE

Lock him up! Throw away the key!
He assaulted me;
He battered my beliefs – hurt my pride,
questioned the things in which I confide;
There are laws against these taunts, you know,
so stop your jibes, or prison you’ll go,
we won’t have injustice in this day and age,
so take your bigotry off the stage …

Hold on a minute, what’s your game?
Are we never, ever, to blame,
something with which we disagree,
questioning life’s rich tapestry?
The injustice is you! Not me.

(c) Anthony North, October 2008

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LIVE WIRE – Fiction

We all know him. He starts off at school. He’ll maybe play football the best, and he’ll be leader of the gang – after all, he needs an audience so he can perform.
I’m a psychologist. I study him thoroughly. I know him inside out. And as he gets a little older, he’ll be the dare-devil – the first to climb that wall; the first to kiss that girl. And as his hormones click in, he’ll more than kiss her – and many more besides.
He’ll have to do this. He’s enslaved by his psychology. He may be from a broken home. He may have been abused. He may simply have been ignored – how dare they? – but he’ll be broken inside. Somehow.
Years back he’d have been thought a naughty boy who needs a smack. In the deep past, he’d have the devil in him, and be exorcised. Today, he’d be hyper-active and given pills; pampered. Made worse.
He leaves school, and he’s known as the live wire. He’ll succeed in everything he does. He’ll work the hardest, party the wildest, and there won’t be anything he doesn’t know about. But the girl who gets close – she’ll know. She’ll see the vulnerability, the anger, the under-confidence that drives him on to succeed, ‘cos he has to. He was made that way.
But others know him as the swell guy, the leader of the pack, ultra-smooth, ultra-confident – the man they all want to be. But they don’t see him cry at night; don’t see him shake before that confident act. Don’t see the man behind the mask.
Not like I’ve seen – time and time again. Not like I’ve seen them rise in politics, or business, or sport, or entertainment, or any other career that exudes confidence!!
Well, I’ve had enough for today. I stop the computer model – it has run enough times today – cut off its live wire, as it were.
I’ll run it again tomorrow. Circumstances will change. Paths will differ. But the psychology is always the same.
Show me a confident man and I’ll show you a wreck.

© Anthony North, October 2008

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