Musings On A Mad World

 

I called this blog site  Musings On A Mad World. Why that? I could have called it many things, for example,

• What’s Wrong With Social Policy?
• The Appalling Effects of So-Called Welfare Reform
• Infamy Infamy, Why Does This Government Seem To Have It Infa Disabled People?
• Why Are They Trying To Destroy The Welfare State?
• Why is it always the most powerless people who are coming under attack?

and so on.

But there is a simple reason why I called it Musings On A Mad World. As someone who has had long term contact with the psychiatric system, and been involved in the world of survivor activism for many years now, I have increasingly come to feel that what I see around me routinely in our day to day world is more and more mad and increasingly maddening. By which I mean it makes no sense and it seems to be driving more and more people to distress, difficulty and even madness. And I wanted to make more sense of that and develop a conversation about the maddening effects of the kind of world we now seem to live in.

Every day I feel I am faced with such madness. It seems to be everywhere. Inescapable.

On TV, I watch poor white working class people in America say that Donald Trump is their hero and saviour because he is genuine, isn’t a politician, he is a business man and that must mean he’s more competent and better. No he is a property developer who has dispossessed people from their homes and he is not so much a business person as a boss. I ask those poor people do you usually sing the praises of incredibly rich bosses, don’t you usually complain that they take all the money and pay you peanuts? Do you really trust and value YOUR boss? I doubt it.

Or I see Health Minister Hunt explain that 50,000 junior doctors have all got it wrong and the contract he wants to force on them will be better for them, for the NHS and all of us – a man who has written in black and white to say the NHS should be privatized. And yet given the UK media, it is likely that many people will believe him. But if I ask them if a medical emergency affected your child, who would you turn to a politician or a doctor, I know who they will trust more and put more trust in and he won’t have MP after his name or Minister before it.

Or I think back to May 2015 and the Tories win an election even they thought they couldn’t win, given their track record, because enough people voted for them in enough millions. The same people who hate the bankers, hate the vast salaries and bonuses they give themselves, know the government does nothing about it, yet are more prepared to hate people on benefits who had nothing to do with the economic crash inspired by politicians and bankers which have damaged millions of lives.

This isn’t a crazy world? Where instead of hating the people and countries stoking up mass death and millions dispossessed in Syria, most people dutifully seem to turn their hate and anger against those fleeing such man-made disasters, as refugees and asylum seekers, even though they know they are dying in large numbers as they try and escape, through boats sinking and being drowned.

I mustn’t despair. I mustn’t give up on all this madness. So I have to try and make sense of it. I have to try and highlight it. I have to hope the conversation develops. So that is why I write this blog and that is why I have called it Musings On A Mad World. Please help me think it through and keep the discussion going and up front.