Ass About Face?

Is it me, or do we most of us really get our priorities back to front, or ass upwards, as my Father used to say?

Please don’t misunderstand me, I don’t envy or begrudge anyone anything they have – well perhaps Brad Pitt with Angelina Jolie, but you know what I mean. I can’t help thinking that, though, for instance, all the vast amount of money that has been spent in the UK and across Europe (is it the same in the US?) in order to put in often impossibly steep ramps for wheelchairs and all the other “access” facilitators for the disabled and that often make life more difficult for the rest of us, are just an enormous waste of money and nothing much more than tokenism anyway.

Like I said, please don’t misunderstand me, I cannot comprehend what it must be like to be severely disabled and, frankly, I have no desire to find out. However, we can (supposedly) send men to the Moon – and now they’re even talking about Mars too; we can produce bombs with unimaginable power; we can search for anti-matter, black holes, dark matter and study the Universe billions of years ago; but we can’t apparently manage to design and provide (free of charge!) wheelchairs and/or other gadgets for the disabled so that they can climb stairs, steps and so on like the rest of us. Why can’t such disadvantaged people have whatever tools it will take to allow them to live a basically more or less normal life in the world as it is for everyone else, not in a modified version of reality designed to partially ameliorate (and therefore underline) the fact that one group of people is physically less able than others?

It’s the same with so called disadvantaged kids. We screwed up the education system and produced a generation of largely totally crap parents who ignore their children and allow them to run riot and eventually become a burden on society as a whole and then what do we do? We send them off on challenging holidays and other enterprises that the rest of us will never be able to afford! I repeat, I don’t begrudge these people what they get, but I can’t see why the rest of us can’t have it too and, anyway, why cannot the people who wasted our money creating the problem in the first place be made to pay for these slightly doubtful solutions?

I suppose, to be totally truthful, there is one group that I do envy (somewhat), though, for what they have – and that’s women. They seem able to get together as groups and actually help and support each other in so many ways and enterprises. Men don’t do that in my experience – not really. Anyway, I always did prefer the company of women, since living vicariously through the successes and failures of some sports team with which I have no connection other than as a fan has never been my idea of fun.

Perhaps I should enquire about the surgery involved in becoming a… then again, I think I really like women pretty much from a male point of view, if you see what I mean.

Ho, hum. Life can be quite complicated, can’t it?

Reproduced with kind permission from Christopher Williams Blog