LEFT VERSUS RIGHT

LEFT VERSUS RIGHT

OR RED VERSUS BLUE

OR

WANNABE RICH VERSUS WANNABE RICHER

From the moment a child is born something rather wonderful starts to happen.

Having only experienced the moist and warm conditions in the womb, the babe has to contend with drier and cooler conditions outside of it.

He/she learns to cope with that. He’s learned a lesson or two about surviving in what, if he’d thought about it, was a hostile environment. But he didn’t think about it: everything was so new he was probably confused.

And that very survival at aged an hour or so is the trigger that sets him off on the most important task of all: learning.

And caring parents help him there.

I suppose the earliest lessons are the most important as guides to surviving life. Like hot can hurt, milk/food is good if it tastes good, and so on. And another lesson is that learning itself is absolutely essential or you won’t be able to cope with something new or something unexpected just round any corner.

It’s then that other things get channelled into the infant brain, lessons come along that may well have nothing to do with survival but are learned anyway. And having been learned along with important stuff like how to live safely, they are pretty permanent and hard to dislodge, or unlearn.

And that’s where religions have stepped in.

When I was young and before I was old enough to go to school I went to a Sunday School and it was there that I was told a series of the most terrible lies imaginable, like the first people were Adam and Eve and had a fondness for naughty fruit which condemned them to live in a desert. Like at Christmas a baby was born to a virgin mother (what was virgin? I bet I didn’t understand the notion of virginity, but the stories went in anyway), like it’s a darned good idea to turn water into wine (though why would anyone want wine?), and so on.

I shook it off, but it took me a long time to unlearn the stuff. I blame Catholicism although I was told I was most definitely C of E, because a parade of pontiffs decided that sin was not believing in the Good Book and its Master, and I didn’t want to be known as a sinner.

Then comes along greed. Over a few centuries greed has disguised itself as democracy and even though the still to be adult brain must never be confused for the innocent one of a new born baby it finds itself fed with attitudes, and these can roughly be divided into wanna be rich and wanna be richer.

Do you see where I’m going?

I’m what is politely called an elderly man and I’ve lost the need for a fortune, not that I was ever addicted to wealth, probably because my childhood saw precious little of anything remotely associated with riches and we survived, my mum, my brother and me, anyway. But I have noted that the wannabe richer brigade have invented a few theories that don’t hold much water if you think of them. Theories like important, even essential, services are best handled by private agencies because, well, they make a profit and that’s an incentive to make those services better.

It’s rot, of course. We’ve seen that as service after service has been sold off, become more expensive to those who use it and has provided beautiful profits for the wannabe richer brigade, paid, of course by those who wannabe rich.

Back in the 1940s the National Health Service was created by a few enlightened philanthropists who were from the wannabe rich party. Basically, it was established on the understanding that life needs protecting for all and therefore good health must be available to all, and the cost spread over small weekly payments that they call National Insurance (as opposed to private insurance with would be a] more costly and b] not available to all.)

The system worked. People were healthier and lived longer, and we must never forget that our lives are more important than anything to us because when we’re dead we have no lives. (By the way, this is why I can’t understand why some people are perfectly happy to die for a cause, because when they’re dead and gone what use is any cause to them? Their offspring you might say, the future… but what use is any future to eyes that can’t see it? Better ask the ghost of Hitler…)

So where was I? Ah yes. The National Health Service which the Wannabe Richer types have their eyes on, with help from mates who print newspapers to elicit support from Wannabe Rich folk who can’t see any way they’ll ever be better off.

But germs have been sown, germs that will sprout, and Wannabe Rich men and women find it increasingly difficult to shake off their belief in the Wannabe Richer brigade because they’ve got richer and they must be right. And having convinced themselves and not wanting to believe they can ever believe lies (which is another of those gorgeous lessons that life teaches us) they cling to supporting a philosophy that, not helping them get rich, makes them poorer. And they blame others for their pain, the homeless, the lost, the refugees from wars, anyone lower down the social ladder than themselves.

And always will until they triumph in the same kind of inner battle that I fought when I mentally dismantled the yoke of religion and stopped worrying about the sin of disbelieving.

And some, the brighter few, may learn that because their parents espoused a belief in Wanna be Richer morals, they don’t have to.

Peter Rogerson 14.05.22

...

Author's Note

This is an essay rather than a story.