Think Before You Speak

[poliphilo]

Ailz has quit Facebook because she was tired to getting into spats with feather-bedded young people who think the poor would stop being poor if only the State treated them harshly enough. Take away their child benefit and- hey presto- no more children living in poverty- that sort of thing. Is it just my neighbourhood or are today's young people a lot more right-wing than we were?

It so happens I ran across a quote from Marx this morning. Boiled down to its essentials it was saying that the morality that obtains in any society is the morality that serves the interests of the ruling class. So, for example, it isn't theft to enclose common land but it is theft to poach a rabbit or a deer from the land-encloser. It makes you want to spit, doesn't it? Or at least it does if you sit down and think about it.  Only people don't think. They just swim around in the murk gulping down the intellectual fish food that drifts down from above by way of the Mail, the Telegraph and the BBC.

I seem to have Dickens on the mind at the moment but it strikes me that if only the feather-bedded young people would read him (he's easier than Marx) they might stop believing it was so cool to be cruel.

Comments

[craftyailz.livejournal.com]

I've been lucky and never been unemployed for more than a few weeks, but I have had a lot of time off sick - and got fired from a couple of jobs because of it. I also - when doing piece work had holidays when I didn't have the fare to get to work - after getting caught by the transport police not paying for the full journey. I, rarely, and others often, have lived on things like dry cornflakes for a week or more because that was all I had. My cat, Oscar, was fed even if I went hungry. That was when I was on the dole in Scotland.

If you don't have any money it gets worse as time goes on - how do you get to interviews, buy smart clothing for said interviews, afford a phone to call or leave a number for someone to ring you? It is reckoned that between 1 & 10% of the unemployed don't want to work and about the same of sick swindlers, but reading the papers you'd think it was the opposite way around and that most unemployed people are shirkers. I don't believe all I read,but I do read a wide variety of views on a subject that interests me. xx