It's bad to do good.

That seems to be the message I’ve been getting recently. Not sure I understand it myself. To be a human rights lawyer. To point out that systemic racial inequality is a thing, no matter how much some of us like to insist it isn’t. To suggest that maybe we try to acknowledge that life is easier if you’re white and that Black lives do matter, to be told only that all lives matter, as if you were ever trying to suggest anything different. Obviously all lives matter. Including the lives of the people drowning in the Channel. It seems the people that like to declare, frothing at the mouth, that all lives matter also suggest we deliberately sink boats and drown people, with no acknowledgement of the cognitive dissonance required to hold both of these points of view at the same time.

But to be a lawyer defending the rights of humans in a difficult position with no other way to get help, in accordance with the laws of this very country that seems so hostile to people from other countries at the moment, more than I ever remember, is seemingly a bad thing. They’re merely do-gooders. Doing good is apparently worthy of contempt nowadays.

And we appear to have adopted that perception from over the water, where the (outgoing, hopefully) administration declares that Nazis can be ‘very fine people’ but ‘Antifa’ are a terrorist organisation. Antifa isn’t an organisation all, but merely stands for people who are anti-fascist. That’s right. If you oppose fascism you are an enemy of the state in the good old freedom-loving U S of A. With luck, their entire system of democracy and free and fair elections will survive the current sustained attack on it and will soon re-confirm that opposing fascism is a good thing. And then hopefully members of our own government won’t contemptuously label them do-gooders.

I don’t get why we think that doing nothing but clapping health workers and nurses is all that is necessary. Pay people risking (and often giving) their lives to help as many people as they can. Provide them with the equipment they need, by acquiring it using transparent procurement processes, rather than giving the money, uncontested, to a company that happens to have a mate or their other half on the board. This is the dictionary definition of corruption and still almost nobody gives a shit.

We get instead ludicrous statements like nobody could have predicted the current mess without a crystal ball from people in control of the country’s response who really should know better. Well I guess I for one must have had a crystal ball when I called the resurgence back in this very blog in June – and that’s without retroactively changing it like a certain supposed brains behind the power did.

There is other terminology designed to make simply being good seem worthy of contempt out there as well. Stating on a public platform that maybe we should try to make sure children don’t go hungry is merely ‘virtue signalling’. As if the people accusing you of ‘signalling your virtue’ cannot possibly conceive of a thought that isn’t entirely selfish and just a case of simply expressing that it would be better if children don’t go hungry. And the argument that it’s because parents should be responsible for their children’s wellbeing and that they shouldn’t have had children if they couldn’t afford to look after them seems to assert that somehow one must know all possible futures before deciding if they can afford to procreate. Which is just silly. And taking this argument to its logical extreme, maybe you have a parent that is an addict. Maybe they don’t feed their kids because they’re feeding their habit. Maybe they’ve found a way to exchange school meal vouchers for hard drugs. In what possible reality is the appropriate response to allow the child to bear the brunt of that neglect? To just let the child go hungry and accept that as some kind of just punishment for the parent? Costs a lot less to feed kids than it does to pay companies to fail to produce protective equipment for nurses. But hey, one is business, the other is disgusting virtue signalling. How can we justify reducing the percentage of our GDP we spend on overseas aid using the excuse that we need to help people in our own country, and then when the need to help people in our own country arises, we just…don’t?

One more: woke. To be woke, is to be a subject of ridicule. Define for me exactly what is meant by being woke. Put simply, it’s to be made aware of the struggles of other groups of people that don’t benefit from the privilege that you enjoy. It’s to be made aware of the danger they often find themselves in. It is to be woken up to the fact that as bad as you think you have it, there are entire demographics that have it worse, and have always had it worse, and without your acknowledgement and without you resolving to take steps to change it, will always have it worse. Usually the people that resist this acknowledgement are striving to keep the status quo where their privilege allows them to keep their eyes turned away from the difficulties faced by others. Difficulties they could help with, if they would only open their eyes and see.

I guess I’m just going to have to become public enemy number 1, because I can’t see a time when I will ever be proud of not caring about others, no matter how much that becomes the cool thing to do.

The things I miss the most.

It’s not easy being shut away most days is it? I mean, some things are lovely. Spending time in my house or my garden when usually I’d be away from it most of the time, working to ensure I can afford it. Working from home does mean I spend a lot of time shut away in one corner of the house, but it’s not a long walk to the garden or the kettle when I need a break.

Spending all my days in the company of my wife still hasn’t gotten old, and I can’t see that it ever will. For me. Can’t speak for her. Sure my kids are testing my patience to varying degrees of extremity every day, but for at least part of every day there are good times. They do miss their friends and I’m sure the cat would rather us be gone for the day so she can sleep in peace, but generally it’s not so bad.

There are some things I’m missing though. I want to go and see people in my family that aren’t in my immediate household. And not from 2 or more metres away – I want to hug them. I want to go to the pub and spend too much money on an average meal and sip overpriced wine. I am missing interaction with colleagues at work. All of that, I’m missing about as much as I expected to, but there’s something I miss more than I thought I would: cinema.

I mean, I didn’t even go that often, and when I did it was usually to watch kids’ films; the last two times before this kicked off I went to see Sonic the Hedgehog and Pixar’s Onward. But always having the option to go if the opportunity arose; that it was there should I need it. That’s what I miss. Laughing loudly at Jumanji: The Next Level with my eldest. Being utterly transfixed by Blade Runner 2049. Watching the breathless final hour of Avengers: Endgame play out (that link contains spoilers, for info). Having my brain melted by the sheer impossibility of the stunt work of Mad Max: Fury Road. I’ve started to go further back, remembering fondly the first times watching Avatar, Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade or (in what I think might have been my first ever cinema trip) E.T. I’m positively misty eyed at the thought of going to see Dune later this year.

This is the thing I want to come back the most of all. All hail the Picture House.

The good old days...

Worst single-day death toll in all of Europe. Seems quite possible we’re still weeks away from the peak. The people that caught The Virus from the people that went to Cheltenham and to see the Stereophonics are going to be amongst those dying in the coming weeks. It’s hard not to be freaked out and afraid. Still no sign of the mass testing and tracing that the countries successful at limiting the spread were using from the start. This isn’t going away any time soon it seems.

Seems the magic money tree did exist after all. It seems inevitable that this will cause a change in the way this and other countries are run, doesn’t it? Seems like all those important jobs like, I dunno, hedge fund speculation, can all be done at home, or even not done at all, and the ones that don’t pay enough to live on are the jobs that are actually important, doesn’t it? Seems like this minor trial run of the climate change-led catastrophe-laden future that is already underway might make folks think twice about continuing on this path, doesn’t it?

If I might offer a brief cold shower? The propaganda shat out by the press and social media trolls and bots have successfully caused us to lurch further and further to the right-wing, destroying, piece by piece, the very institutions we are all now reliant on for our lives and the lives of our loved ones. Truth means nothing. Sensationalist journalism and viral social media has made absolutely sure of that.

When the daily death toll in Italy was going up to 700, 800, 900 it was reported like the disastrous tragedy is was. It took us a couple of weeks longer to put similar (but less effective) measures in place, and now when our own death toll has exceeded Italy’s worst day, The Sun declared it really was Good Friday, focusing only on the fortunes of one man. As the Prime Minister, it’s quite an important man whether you voted for him or not to be fair, but the uplifting positivity in the face of all that potentially preventable tragedy is exactly what The Sun and papers like it do. Nearly a thousand people dead in one day, and it’s framed like a good news story.

I’m afraid, therefore, I don’t think this inevitable sea change that others see is necessarily on the cards. I’m afraid, I can see all too clearly all that’s happened being left behind for the continued quest for a Britain of the past that never really existed. It's currently 'not the time' to question or criticise apparently. But then it'll be 'why bring up the past? Move on' when questions are asked afterwards. They’ll continue to lead us ever onwards, telling us burning all of our relationships with Europe (like, I don’t know, telling them to piss off when they offered to help us source desperately-needed ventilators) will bring back the good old days.

Let’s hope I’m full of shit. Let’s hope the worst is behind us, The Virus is defeated and we actually put in place decent pay for nursing staff and think about how amazing all these places around the world look without smog and put in place all the technology that already exists and build an infrastructure that isn’t built on making people rich at the expense of, well, absolutely everything.

But let’s not kid ourselves that it’s an inevitability, because The Sun (and others) are going make damn sure we continue on our path into headlong destruction.

Occasional feature: Ending with a song loosely related to the post (or more like a lyric I can take out of context and loosely relate to the post):

The Libertines: Good Old Days: “It chars my heart to always hear you calling, calling for the good old days. ‘Cause there were no good old days.”