The Way we were
A couple of months ago, I had occasion to be off work and immobile for two weeks and found myself extremely bored.
Occupational health had said that I could not return to work until the physical terrorist had said that I was mobile enough not to trip over something and inconveniently die on the premises if I entered the office. The requirement was for me to “rest” and do the exercises I was given twice a day. 
As someone with a low boredom threshold, I quickly got fed up with crosswords, jigsaws and books full of tests to stretch my IQ. I tried reading and listening to audiobooks but to no avail. I needed something to make me think and so believe it or not I switched on the TV.
All the people looked the same, a sort of avatar for the average white, black or Asian person was available in various advertisement combinations. In the daytime these mainly consisted of funeral and other types of insurance to stop you being a burden on your “loved ones” and pleas from various charities asking anything from two pounds a week to twenty-five. If that doesn’t depress the elderly and the unemployed nothing will.
Flipping through the channels I came across talking pictures TV and was transported to a different world. All the faces were unique to their owners and the language they used was very different from the average speech on TV programmes today.
As a little experiment, I decided to compare programmes of similar types from the past and the present to see what differences I could observe. I ruled out programmes before 1980 so as to compare late twentieth century Britain with early twenty-first century Britain which was in my opinion, the period when we first became major importers of American culture and values at the expense of our own.
Well, I was shocked at how much we’ve changed since the 1980’s. Not only in the way people are portrayed in pictures, but how our speech patterns have changed in every way from the type of slang that we use to the cadence of our utterances. In the 8o’s, people still looked like themselves. Teeth are a good indicator of whether a “more pleasing image for you” has been created or not. In the 80’s, people still had variable teeth and hair; body size too was variable and type of dress was the most varied of all.
Another thing that struck me was that people did not feel the need to wave their hands about every time they wanted to make a point and were capable of having a conversation without injecting it with emotional incontinence in every sentence. Speech was also slower and gave the listener time to absorb what the person was saying. Less of a tennis match, more of a discussion. Different views were often aired and there was less content designed to make you think a certain way. You were allowed to not like someone, or disagree with them without either being a demon yourself, or without your opponent being demonised. In other words, there was more of a live and let live atmosphere about programming. People with different views from the mainstream were invited to air their views and seen as interesting and no one was looking for a “gotcha” moment.
We had not yet become a therapy society. It was assumed that most people would work it out for themselves and if not, ask for help if they needed it from family or friends. Social media had not yet been invented and most people experienced life outside their own immediate friends and family through the TV.
In the 80’s, long haul travel was still for the wealthy and most people popped back and forwards to the continent if they wanted to get out of Britain. In other words, most people in this country were still anchored to their culture and knew the difference between Britain and America, which they saw as slightly fun and exotic but a bit crazy as well.
Fast forward to date and we have almost two generations who have become a nation of anywhere plastic Yanks. We hi five each other, talk at the speed of light, say whoa instead of wow and see the world exclusively in black and white a la the marvel universe. One of the most distressing imports is the need for a superhero leader to show us the way to a better life. This is so un-English!! It hasn’t done our MP’s much good either. All politics has devolved into a sort of universal playground slanging match. The “your side is worse than mine” stuff that people got detention for at school in the days when we were trying to help children to solve problems and achieve maturity. In those times, and remember it was not so long ago, we were a nation of individuals who occasionally came together for a time around some general purpose that needed sorting, but on a day-to-day basis, were much happier living in small family groups where individuality could be expressed and accepted, whether agreed with or not.
Now, we have two generations in a state of permanent immaturity with most people having the emotional responses of a fourteen-year-old. There is a high price to pay for letting it all hang out. It means that you can more easily be pushed this way and that by generating strong emotions, even if what is being fed to you is totally ridiculous and goes against your own life experience. 
Think about it, can you really believe that you are personally responsible for the fate of the rest of the world, or that you should feel shame about some of your ancestors who did bad things?
Children do. The younger the child the less of a concept they have that they are not the ruler of the world. A twelve-year-old may truly believe that by donating to certain charity a child on the other side of the world will live and if they don’t, that child will die. Children also believe that if someone has something they want, they should be able to take it if they can show that the other child does not deserve it; but that no one should take things from them.
Mixed with the guilt is a sort of hidden power and arrogance, the power that says that the world lives or dies by the decisions that I make about my life and so the fate of the world is in my hands. If I choose to treat the world carelessly by not catering to its needs, then I am a “bad” person who should be punished by people who are better than me and can see my evil heart. But if I am a “good” person, and love the world even more than my parents, then I can fix everything that is wrong and the whole world will love me and be grateful.
Magical thinking, catastrophic predictions, dreams of being a special person, seeking out evil and looking for the ultimate saviour has helped many and adolescent through a troubling developmental stage in life. Unhappy children at this stage often fantasise that they have been adopted and that their real parents are not only very rich, but are pining away because they can’t find them.
In the 80’s, hands on parenting rather than state interference helped the majority through by calling time on some of the more vitriolic activities of this kind of thinking and restricting the child’s freedom to practise some of the wider excesses generated by their emotional swings.
TV programmes reflected this with most of the pre-twenty-first century programmes showing parents at the heart of family sit coms and soaps, with people shouldering the burdens of life and generally believing that they had to go to work and earn their keep.
This is no longer true, and playtime rules. There are whole groups of special people who earnestly believe that they don’t have to do anything else except shout about their rights, needs and grievances. This causes them to place the worst possible meaning on others intent towards them generating feelings that they have the right to demand they be punished based on those feelings. In order to make the world fit their feelings, they often have to distort or deny history itself so that ordinary people will understand that it is shameful to expect anything from such ill-treated groups and it should be our pleasure to cater to their every need. Indeed, whole industries are built upon such groups even though the lot of them don’t even reach ten percent of the population and in the case of trans, less than one percent I believe. Unfortunately, like climate change, when there is a lot of money in it, it is very difficult to get things to change as the people becoming powerful through funding this, do not want it.
The sad thing about it is that when the babies with their axes have bashed up everything around them for not giving them what they want and believe they deserve; like a real child, they will hold out their arms to be picked up by a parent who will make it all better. The options out there at the moment are pretty chilling I’m afraid.
I am not usually a conspiracy theorist, but accepting the wholesale import of the American version of adolescence as a great way to bring up children seems like something that was done by people who had reached maturity and knew very well what they expected to happen. I would say that they were not very nice people, but they could plan ahead and they had patience and problem-solving skills, so were definitely past age fourteen developmentally.
Many articles have been written about the long march through the education system and the civil service and citing a communist/socialist reason for that. I think it’s much simpler. Children, even big ones are much easier to control. Make sure ordinary people haven’t a hope in hell of reaching maturity, give them a good front man/woman to admire and the world is your oyster.
When I saw film of what we used to be like, our customs, traditions and quirks all on display in a healthy unselfconscious way it made me sad. We need to unravel the wool a bit (to use a knitting metaphor), back down to where we dropped a stitch and knit up again in a tighter pattern. We, like other peoples are unique in our cultural development for good or bad, just like every other person in the world.
Becoming a plastic Yank is not the answer and we should fight against it.