I am serious and please don’t call me Shirley
I’m sure that most of you have heard that line multiple times and probably groaned once or twice. This post could as easily have become a Monthly Pole Dance post as it’s mostly a polemic post and what it’s mostly about is compliance (or not) with politics. To make this one more of a considered post and less of a rant i’ll try to do it in the same methodology as I used to do with any referral call to a medical colleague : thus a taste of SBAR in my blog this month.
Situation.
I think that we are up against a serious political problem in the UK, that problem being that our authoritarian prime minister has declared that we are all mandated to have a digital ID despite most of us already having a UK Passport which grants us access at our borders (what borders) and other national borders, a National insurance number which, in it’s own way, allows us to work but mainly helps to ensure that we are compliant with tax and for most people a driving licence which nowadays has a photo ID and is often required to show as proof when say we go for a job interview.
Last time I went for a job interview I had to produce each of those plus a few others including proof of where I lived and even when I sent all of those things to be seen by the HR department they came back with a demand that I produce something else, I don’t remember what, before I could be re employed by the same hospital that i’d worked at for the previous 20 years. At this stage in my post I have to ask whether a digital ID stored on a ‘smart’ phone would get around all of that and I suspect that I already know the answer – that I would still have to produce everything else before I even got to an interview.
I may as well say, at the outset, that I think we are in a FUBAR time in the world and Britain is but a weak example (please feel free to Google FUBAR if you don’t already know it’s meaning. In a future post, one that i’m writing now, i’ll make my case for why I think many western cultures aren’t just broken but broken and irreperable : in a word – FUBAR. The end result, at least in my mind, is that life has just become a lot more serious and the things that I touch on in this post are but a foretaste of dark times to come.
Background
This is where I go a bit off piste with the post so here goes : belt yourselves in as it’s going to be a long one.
Around 2015 I first became aware of a kooky psychologist called Jordan Peterson when I chanced upon his lectures which he filmed and put on Youtube. A lot now is history : I became one of his Patreon supporters and later went to his first public lecture in the UK (I actually appear in the video of that lecture as I was in the front row and got the whole JBP experience). In the regular podcast that he gave for Patreon members I remember that he would answer a number of questions posed by participants : one I remember concerned personal responsibility for events normally outside an individuals responsibility.
Dr Peterson’s famous/infamous question and answer sequence came when he was asked “do you believe in God” ? : his reply, and please excuse me if I have to paraphrase was “what do you mean by God and what do you mean by belief” ?. I remember it making me a bit cross at the time that he seemed to be avoiding the question by being annoyingly intellectual about it : I think I understand a bit better now what he was getting at. The question that I have in mind today though, and once again I have to paraphrase from memory was something like : what are we responsible for ? – in terms of the things that happen around us and to us. His answer was a bit shocking – everything !.
Today, when I spend wasted time bemoaning what an authoritarian/communist prime minister says or does I might take the line that I have no responsibility for what he does, except in a Petersonian kind of way I do and not because I voted for him but that, like many, I simply opted out of my right to vote and that was the result. The sad thing is that I had even made the effort to find out about him and his past ; his words and his actions, or lack of them, now seem blindingly obvious.
The fault isn’t mine only as so many people like myself were so disenchanted with the whole political system simply walked away from any involvement with it. The Conservatives largely collapsed – I think their actions/non actions during the Covid 19 pandemic have a lot to do with that and their own infighting and lack of real leadership did the rest.
It was one of a series of wake up calls though and today I think that the whole country needs to wake up, rise up, adopt civil disobedience and non compliance and exercise our right to vote whichever way we choose to do so. If he is what the country truly wants then I say thankyou and goodbye as I want nothing more to do with this country and it’s people.
R – Recommendations.
An SBAR briefing or handover (of a patient) usually ends with a recommendation for further action. In this case I think that people like me – the masses that disengaged from anything political – now have to re engage and not just complain loudly and vociferously but actually take some action towards dealing with the whole problem. Some, when reading this, might conclude that I am just an angry white man whom is now going to shout for a bloke called Nigel : my answer is no because iv’e applied the same personal tests as I have with the PM. Maybe that’s the first step : to see and know what we don’t want even if we can’t yet throw our energy behind someone we have a more positive regard of. I don’t want to start throwing names around as every time iv’e had a good feeling about a politician it’s almost always gone sour very quickly.
Best wishes Y’awl….Wa-oh
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 