exactly where is nancy, sammy?
Every so often we all get asked rhetorical questions were the answer is both obvious and quite rightly expected by the questioner. This last week one or two the topical news channels have prompted a couple of the more obvious ones: What’s worse, they ask: tax avoiders or benefit cheats? Being feckless and rich, or feckless and poor? Looters or corporate fat-banking-cats? Davie & Sammy leaving their daughter in a house of ill-repute or merely taking their kids to one in the first place? Now, of course these are all stupid and banal questions (as the correct answers are all too bleeding obvious) but it never ceases to shock me that it’s these questions that appear to inform so much of our political debate in this country of ours.
For the moment though, let’s forget about silly Jimmy Carr’s lack of morality and David’s forgetful turn and concentrate on the poor (and obviously) feckless. And for once let’s put to the back of our minds the completely understandable behaviour of those global corporations that have condemned us all to years of worldwide recession and economic doom (did you see what I did there?). Yeah, let’s focus in on the feckless poor.
Recently published research has highlighted the disturbing fact that children are increasingly turning up for school hungry, having had nothing to eat since, if they were lucky, the night before, or earlier. Throwing already angry readers of the Daily Mail into a fit of apoplectic rage, there surely can be no excuse for such an erroneous dereliction of parental duty. Hanging’s too good for them! And where’s the birch when you need it?
I thank my lucky-stars that both the question and the situation from which is arises is purely hypothetical. I’ve never been in this position and I hope never to be but the one thing that I have learned over the years is never say never and there go I but for the grace of God. I do however have first-hand experience of desperate people doing desperate things. Would I steal to put food in my family’s belly. You betcha. And without much remorse let me tell ya. One could argue that stealing to feed your family is not as bad as sending your kids to school hungry but, hey what’s a little hair-splitting between friends. I also suspect the affluent are often as inconsiderate to their offspring but with one subtle difference: they’ll either give them the money to buy something on the way in, the au-pair can sort it out or hey, little Jemima already boards so what do I care!
I know, I know, I know, it’s as ridiculous to idealise noble wealth as it is noble poverty. Unfortunately there is a massive tendency to do exactly that in the ideologies of both left and right. Wealth is not an antidote to human frailty and weakness. Poverty can, and does, drive people to desperate measures, and render them less able to resist their own fragility. And wealth can lend an arrogance of indifference.
