A couple of times this week I’ve felt disappointed by intelligent, good people. Now this may be me being a grump and intolerant in my never-ending poorliness, or perhaps sometimes we do need a bit of a nudge to be better.
The hugely offensive (that is her raison d’être these days, it seems) Katie Hopkins was one of the headline acts in a supposed debate on benefits – which of course was not going to be serious or useful in any way, shape or form, and she performed as expected. This did annoy me as there were also some good people there, people with experience and views on how things can be better, but of course they were not heard over the baying of the hired shock merchants – a shame indeed but we must find reasoned debate elsewhere and make it clear that we want it, support it when it does happen.
The programme was discussed amongst chums on Facebook and someone brought up the fact that Ms Hopkins is not the most obviously attractive person – I think a common comparison is to horses. Now really – why do this? What the heck does it matter what she looks like? She is not pretending to be any kind of beauty and quite frankly if her ugly views were to show on her face she would look a lot worse. Are we not ready to grow beyond the puerile, laughing at those less attractive or able, those who dress with anything other than sartorial elegance. Do we have to reduce ourselves to such playground pettiness? You see the next step to this is to use a person’s gender, age, colour, religion, size as the thing to use as a weapon. Stop it! Are there not enough people who understand how wrong this is that we cannot change things?
Today I got annoyed at the comments on a friend’s post about a UKIP chap sharing some pretty offensive suggestions – his dress sense and how he looks was the thing raised and made mock of by some. His party provides quite enough for us to disagree with and argue about – what does it matter if he wears a bright pink jacket and yellow tie? Stop it! Don’t be distracted from the fact that what he’s suggesting is plain wrong, let us not be like that dog in the film Up when he spots a squirrel.
I suppose this is some kind of moral high ground thing, but so what – there is plenty of room there and perhaps that is where the grass is greener.
I don’t know. Is this growing up? Since hitting 50 I seem far less tolerant of such attitudes (some may consider it childishness but I know plenty of children who understand these things better than some adults – which is promising. My boy would be most disdainful but he’s never been that childish himself, bless him). Nowadays I see no reason why I cannot make some kind of difference and hopefully I won’t run out of energy for that. I do know that we can do better and there is no good reason why we do not.