Trusting in the New Year

The start of a new year always feels like we’ve got to the top of a dodgy ladder and fallen off, only to have to start climbing again. No guarantees and no foreknowledge of what exactly is to come.

OK, we can assume that 2011 is going to bring huge challenges to many people and life is going to be tough for individuals, families, businesses, institutions and charities:

• as unemployment shoots up, so there will be huge pressure on marriages (undermining family stability and affecting large numbers of children)
• history teaches us that this will put additional pressure on the NHS – particularly mental health services (which are already under-resourced and often hidden)
• radical public service cuts will have a direct effect on local economies which depend more on public services (particularly in the north of England)
• private businesses will consequently suffer in the wake of the above
• crime will increase, but the police will have fewer resources to address either the real situation or public perceptions of it.

And that’s just the miserable stuff for starters. You can add in predictions of continuing public unrest, direct protests against the effects of the cuts, and a growing public instinct for ‘doing something’ about it (an expression of human dignity and responsibility?).

So, no cheer then? Well, that depends. It is unclear whether faith communities and charities will be able to plug the gaps left by local or central government funding withdrawals. Asking people to give more to charity, though always desirable, is no answer to the problem of cuts to essential funding of local agencies who meet needy people where they are. Among others, churches may be deemed the appropriate agencies for rising to new challenges; but, so far, no research has been done into either capacity or competence.

In other words, we are walking blind into uncharted territory. I have sympathy with David Cameron’s vision for the Big Society, but I have serious doubts about it being deliverable in the short term – I can see it being undermined in both practice and theory by an over-ambitious and overly-radical programme of immediate (rather than programmed/staggered) cuts.

So, given the potentially overwhelming challenges that colour our view of the prospects for 2011 – internationally as well as nationally and locally – where might we turn for an overarching theme that might shape our approach to whatever lies ahead?

I think the Guardian put it well this morning in its editorial comment:

The cynicism which pervades public life at the dawn of 2011 is … a creed that ascribes the basest motives to everybody, and dismisses the very possibility of moral improvement. … mistrust is paralysing politics. It is evident in marketopian reforms which treat public servants as knaves to be slapped into line by the self-interested whack of the invisible hand. It is evident, too, in fear and loathing between the governing and governed, and – we admit – in newspapers being too gleeful about catching yet another snout in the trough. The great injustices of the day have at times been buried in a blizzard of dodgy receipts for duck islands and patio doors. The dismal worldview reaches its apogee in the rightwing blogosphere, where pundits parade as anarchists but subtly entrench hopelessness by decreeing every call for public virtue to be a cover for private vice. None of this is to deny the praiseworthiness of doubt and sceptical inquiry, preconditions for both good government and clear thought. But it is to hope, however vainly, for a collective resolution to extend a smidgeon more trust in considering what makes people tick.

Trust is essential and central to any constructive or positive approach to what lies ahead of us – which we have the responsibility to shape and not just to decry as if we are helpless victims. Trust assumes that we will take seriously the Common Good.

This means – taking the context of the Guardian’s piece seriously – that the media have a massive responsibility not only to question and critique, but also to see themselves as ‘players and participants’ of our society and drop the pretence of being disinterested, objective observers of everybody else. The media shape public perceptions of reality and motivation – and that makes them responsible agents in shaping society and the trust or cynicism that infect public life.

In All’s Well That Ends Well Shakespeare put is like this:

Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none.

We don’t have a right to happiness, despite the assumptions behind the American Declaration of Independence. But, we do have a responsibility to take seriously the well-being of all in our society – especially those least able to secure their own. Trust will either encourage us – or its lack will further destroy us.

 

Childhood and snow: the blame game

Yesterday I wrote about the snow in London and again, later, about the Children’s Society’s Good Childhood report. Was it a case of the day’s cancelled meetings leaving me with too much time on my hands and not enough to occupy my mind, or was there a connection? Well, it won’t come as a surprise to learn that there is a very clear connection.

One of the findings of the report was that children are growing up in the UK in a culture dominated by adults who behave like selfish children, believing that the world revolves around them and that their own self-fulfilment is the ultimate ‘good’ (or ‘right’). The report makes the point that children are inevitably affected by what they experience of adult behaviour. Reports in the newspapers today seem to suggest that the findings have struck a serious chord and sounded an alarm bell about how a generation of children is being negatively influenced and shaped by the cynical selfishness of the older generation – mine.

Britain has been hit by the worst snow in two decades. So, what happens? Everything grinds to a halt for a day or two and people go out to play – resigned to the fact that they can’t get to their work and, so, might as well enjoy the experience as a sort of gift. (I’m being generous.) Then the pundits and politicians come out and start asking the ‘serious’ questions: why did everything stop? Who is to blame for the fact that the trains ground to a halt or that buses couldn’t be fitted with skis? Who was so stupid as to not grit every road in Britain ahead of the snow? After all, we knew it was coming, didn’t we?

Let’s deal with that one first. The same pundits and politicians would be adopting the same self-righteous know-it-all judgement whatever was happening. Just imagine if the Mayor of London had decided to invest in the vehicles, equipment, materials, personnel, etc twenty years ago in order that we could be prepared for this extreme snowfall yesterday. All this stuff would have lain in (presumably) specially built compounds – they have to be kept somewhere as they take up space – and had to be regularly maintained.

And the pundits would be complaining that this was a stupid and wasteful investment for a once-in-twenty-years weather event (as it is now being called). One Canadian woman on Capital Radio yesterday morning made precisely this point: in her home town it snows every other day and they are set up to deal with it, but London could not and should not be ready for this sort of weather which only visits us every two decades.

The connection between the Good Childhood report findings and the snow ‘event’ is the blame game. Is it any surprise if our children grow up cynical, negative and accusatory if the culture we nurture them in is so cynical, negative, unrealistic and self-serving? Perhaps it helps the politicians concerned to get some publicity for their hard-nosed I-could-do-it-better ambition. Perhaps it might help the journalists to ride the wave of finding new targets to justify the column inches and keep a ‘debate’ going for a few days in order to sell a few more papers.

But we shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t just contribute to the corrosive, accusatory, blame culture that so successfully makes our children think cynically about authorities who do their best with the resources they have.

I haven’t yet seen the news reports of nurses and doctors who struggled into their nearest hospitals. Or ordinary people instinctively helping their elderly neighbours, checking on their well-being and doing their shopping. Or the people who struggled to get to work so that the trains and buses might be able to run later and the roads be gritted. Or the fact that millions of people resigned themselves to being stuck and spent the day playing (with their kids?) instead of believing that the Stock Market is all that matters in life. All they get is a kicking.

And we wonder why the children think the world is rubbish and it might not be worth putting yourself out.